Notes from Club Forum 17 June 2024
There was general agreement that the Club had problems around membership numbers and diversity, and that these flowed on to the arrangements around our meetings – specifically the cost of the club and the minimum number required.
We had been unsuccessful in recruiting new members for a number of reasons, some of which revolved around the next generation not being interested in making longer-term commitments to service Clubs (such as Rotary) but would rather provide their support to individual or time-based causes.
There was support to continue in some fashion – to provide service of some kind to our community, for camaraderie, and certainly to remain within a Rotary “brand”. The current timing of the meetings was also considered favourable, being outside work commitments.
The preference was that the Milson Club remain, but the questions remain “how”.
Some suggestions towards this were as follows:
- Maintain existing meetings and supplement them with less formal gatherings, such as coffee meetings during the day or a quick catch-up immediately after work, both of which would be at a different venue and without any meeting structure
- Poll members as to preferences
- Do “stuff” regularly – be it rubbish collections or sausage sizzles etc, but the important aspects are visibility of action for community projects and participation by members
- Seek out the outcomes, and the environment that the younger generation would support for them to be regular participants of the Club
The incoming President offered to assist members in further developing this line of inquiry and report back at the first meeting after the Changeover.