Rus & Janet Peters and our Youth Exchange student, Fareeha Nayebare, delivered wreaths that were used to raise funds for our upcoming Hope for the Holidays service project.

If you did not make it to our last Rotary Club of Forest Grove meeting, here is what you missed…

This Week – At Forest Grove UCC: This week’s meeting, and all of our meetings for the rest of the 2023 calendar year, will be held at the Forest Grove United Church of Christ, 2032 College Way (across the street from Pacific University). Join us as we are joined by Emily Cupo of StoveTeam International.

Remember that if you wish to receive lunch at meetings, confirmation for lunch orders must be received by secretary Janet Peters by the Saturday before each week’s meeting. A sign-up sheet will be available at weekly meetings or you can RSVP to Janet via email.

Plan Ahead – Holiday Cancellations: In order for Rotarians and their families to celebrate the upcoming holidays, our club will not meet at its regular Wednesday time on the following dates: Wed., Dec. 20 and Wed., Dec. 27.

Youth Citizens Of The Month: At our last meeting on Nov. 15, we had the pleasure of honoring our November Youth Citizens of the Month: Sylas Schaumburg and Kyler Trout of Gaston Jr./Sr. High School. Congratulations to them on their recognition! Read The Full Story

Hope For The Holidays: Mark your calendars! This year’s Hope for the Holidays project will take place on Monday, Dec. 18, at the Forest Grove High School Food Pantry. Because of the rules that the Food Pantry has with the Oregon Food Bank, we will not be allowed to distribute meals inside the building. Instead, we will distribute the meals under tents just outside the pantry along Nichols Lane.

A sign-up sheet for volunteers will be distributed at meetings over the next couple of weeks. There will be a need for members with trucks who can help transport food from Fred Meyer and Winco to the high school, as well as set up for the event. The distribution will take place from 4-5:30 p.m., the normal open hours for the food pantry.

All of the food for the project is being covered by $2,500 from the club and $2,500 from a District 5100 Matching Grant. Money from wreath sales and other donations will be used to purchase and provide household items, like toilet paper and laundry detergent, that are normally not available at the Food Pantry.

For more information or questions, please contact Parri Van Dyke.

Wreath Sales: Thank you to everyone once again to everyone who took part in our wreath sale whether purchasing, selling, delivering or making wreaths! The club made $2,029 on the fundraiser, which will go towards the Hope for the Holidays service project. A big thank you to Janet Peters for coordinating the sale once again and to Melinda Fischer for contributing her handmade wreaths for the sale. Additional thank yous to Rus Peters and Fareeha, our Youth Exchange student, for delivering the wreaths this weekend and to Tim & Evelyn Orr, who did work to make some of the wreaths.

A Note About PMail: When club leadership sends out emails through the DacDB Pmail system (these will usually have ROTARY in the subject line), these are mass emails sent for the purpose of informing the whole club of information. While it may look like the email is addressed specifically to you, it is not. Please keep this in mind when choosing to reply to an email.

The PMail system is the same system we use to send the Rototeller out each week. This means that if you are opting-out of receiving club emails, you will not receive the weekly newsletter either.

Rotarian Rob DeCou To Speak At Old College Hall Lecture Series: Rotarian and 2005 Pacific alumnus Rob DeCou will be the featured speaker during Pacific University’s Old College Hall Lecture Series on Wednesday, Dec. 6.

A member of the Nor’Western Rotary Club in Port Angeles, Washington, Rob will present on “Resilience: A Journey Through Entrepreneurship and Ultra-Endurance Endeavors.” The CEO of his own creative business and an instructor at Peninsula College in Washington, Rob has also done numerous ultra-endurance events (bike rides, runs, triathlons, etc.) to raise awareness and funds for a number of causes, including the fight against human trafficking and PolioPlus.

Learn more about Rob in this feature published in the Fall 2023 edition of Pacific magazine, written by Rotarian Blake Timm.

The lecture is free but advance registration is required (there is a cap of 50 attendees). If you are interested in attending, Please Register Online.

McDougall Garden Work Party: Thank you to the small but mighty group that braved the cold to do some clean-up work on the McDougall Garden on Saturday, Oct. 28: Geoff Faris, Pamelajean Myers, Jim Cain, Carl Heisler and Blake Timm. There will be additional clean-up work to do on the garden later in the fall as the leaves continue to fall.

Concours d’Elegance Committee: The Concours d’Elegance Committee is starting the planning for our 50th show on July 21, 2024. If interested in getting further involved with the Concours, the steering committee is always looking for volunteers to prepare for the show throughout the year. For more information, contact Tom Raabe at 503-704-1200 or rotarytomr@gmail.com or Geoff Johnston at 503-939-7868 or gamsma@comcast.net.

The next meeting of the Concours Committee will be on Wednesday, Dec. 13 via Zoom at 7 p.m. If you are interested in attending, please contact Tom Raabe for the link.

Committee Communications & Meetings: Our executive board is working to put together a master calendar of club functions and committee meetings. The goal is that this calendar will be available for all members of the club to access. If your committee is planning to meet in December, please send that information to any member of the executive board as soon as possible.

Past Programs: Did you miss a meeting or want to go back and check out a program again? Most of our programs since May 2020 (over 100 videos to date) are archived on our club’s YouTube page. Visit https://bit.ly/fgrotaryprograms.

Service Opportunities For Club Members
Do You Know Of Service Opportunities?: Are you aware of service opportunities in our area that our members might be interested in? We can advertise those here! This space is not limited to club-sponsored activities but to any service opportunity in the community. To promote the service activity, please send a detailed description of the project, the date and time, contact information and a link to register to Rototeller editor Blake Timm, blakertimm@gmail.com.

FGHS Community Food Pantry: Our club’s support for the Forest Grove High School Food Pantry continues.  Thanks to its partnership with the Oregon Food Bank, food donations are still welcome but are of less need at this time. Of need, however, are toiletries and hygiene products as well as household cleaning materials.

The Food Pantry is open Mondays from 4-5:30 p.m. The pantry is located along Nichols Lane between the football field and the Basinski Center. Click Here for more information on the FGHS Food Pantry and on other resources for those experiencing food insecurity.

For information on the Food Pantry, please contact Brian Burke, bburke@fgsd.k12.or.us. If you wish to make a cash donation to the pantry, Click Here.

Around District 5100
Renee Fontenot Named District Governor Nominee Designate: Renee Fontenot, a member of the Rotary Club of Tualatin, has been selected as the District Governor Nominee Designate to lead District 5100 as District Governor during the Rotary Year 2026-27.

Renee has served as an Assistant Governor of the Metro Region, has served on the Public Image and Learning and Development committees, and has been active in her home club. 

Prior to joining the ranks of District 5100 in 2020, she was active in District 6920 in Georgia and brings 18 years of Rotary experience to the position.

Renee will be presented for formal approval at the District 5100 Business meeting at the One Rotary Conference in Hood River in April. She has already begun her training and preparation by participating in weekly Governor Team huddles and recently attended the Governor Team retreat in Wilsonville.

Please congratulate Renee Fontenot on her selection to the District 5100 Governor team and encourage her during the training she will receive over the next two and one-half years.

District 5100 Newsletter: Click Here To View The Monthly District 5100 Newsletter

Around Rotary International
Rotary Clubs In Brazil Stand “Together Against Polio” (by Etelka Lehoczky): Not everything that happened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has been negative. In Brazil, the pandemic led directly to the creation of a powerful new campaign to promote polio vaccination.

Anti-vaccination sentiment emerged all over Brazil during the pandemic. To reassure people that vaccinations are safe, Antônio Henrique Barbosa de Vasconcelos — a member of the Rotary Club of Fortaleza-Alagadiço, Ceará, Brazil, and now a member of Rotary International’s Board of Directors — suggested creating an evidence-based information campaign. The campaign, called Information Saves Lives, highlighted facts and statistics from the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.

“The COVID campaign was a complete success,” Vasconcelos recalls. “At the launch, we used a room for 500 people. It was packed in the first few minutes.”

For the Information Saves Lives campaign, Vasconcelos’ team designed a wide array of media to promote vaccination: magazine ads, billboards, stickers for bus windows and bus stops, radio spots, a website, and social media graphics. The materials were distributed to clubs all over Brazil, many of which were able either to raise money to pay for media placement or use partnerships to secure free placement.

Soon, Vasconcelos and the other planners realized they could use the same approach to promote polio vaccination. Polio was last recorded in Brazil in 1989, but low vaccination rates could lead to reappearance of the disease. According to the country’s Ministry of Health, the vaccination rate was just 72% in 2022 for children under five years of age. The goal of the National Immunization Program is to vaccinate between 90% and 95% of that group. 

Vasconcelos assembled a team made up of Rotary public image coordinators, polio staff, members of Rotaract and Interact, and staff from Rotary Brasil magazine to create new messaging addressing polio. In addition to the media used in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, Together Against Polio also includes designs that can be printed on balloons and T-shirts. The Together Against Polio website and social media graphics take the message online.

The new campaign’s colorful artwork was deliberately upbeat. 

“The idea was to get children vaccinated against poliomyelitis and at the same time to work on diversity — to show different people united together,” says Carlos Daniel Fernandes, a Rotary public image coordinator and a member of the Rotary Club de Ribeirão Preto-Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. “We wanted to draw attention with joyous images, not sad scenes.”

The Together Against Polio campaign is even stronger than the Information Saves Lives campaign was, Vasconcelos says. At the new campaign’s September launch, almost 2,000 people attended in person, and more than 800 joined online. 

“We have had great feedback,” Vasconcelos says. “We receive dozens of publications and images of events and actions throughout Brazil from the campaign every day.”

As with the Information Saves Lives campaign, Rotary clubs have often been able to print materials and secure ad space for the Together Against Polio campaign at no charge through local partnerships.

“We got static and digital billboards in my city of Fortaleza for free,” Vasconcelos says. “The clubs in my city had 2,000 posters made to be placed in hospitals, schools, health centers, buses, and other visible places, free of charge.”

Because the Together Against Polio messaging has already been approved, the materials can easily be used by clubs, says Aurea Dos Santos, senior content and public relations strategist for Rotary International’s Brazil office.  

“Clubs all across the country don’t have to modify anything in order to use the materials,” she says. “Everything is available on the website, and members can download and use them according to the places and media outlets they have available for the campaign in their regions.”

As a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, Rotary is part of a joint effort that has led to a 99.9% reduction in polio cases worldwide since the establishment of GPEI in 1988. Rotary and its partners have immunized three billion children against polio in 122 countries.

This article first appeared on the Rotary.org website.

Last Week’s Program: Michael Yakos, The Rotary Foundation

At our Nov. 15 meeting, our club’s Rotary Foundation chair, Michael Yakos, gave his annual presentation about the foundation and how our club and district is doing in foundation fundraising.

The Rotary Foundation (TRF) is the 501(c)(3) charitable arm of Rotary International and is supported solely by voluntary contributions from Rotarians, Rotary clubs and friends of the Foundation who share our vision of a better world.

With donations to Annual Fund-SHARE (the main fund for TRF), The Rotary Foundation transforms those gifts into service projects that change lives close to home and around the world. These donations are invested for three year’s growth which supports foundation operations and the principal is then returned to clubs via District Designated Funds (grants) and World Fund (global grants).

Our Hope for the Holidays benefits from a District 5100 grant of $2,500 and our International project, Gardens of Hope, benefits from a District grant of $2,000 each year.

Michael went over the Every Rotarian Every Year program. Every member is asked to contribute to the Rotary Foundation every year. Donations of $25-$50 per Rotarian raises over $5 million annually. A Sustaining Member donates at least $100 every year. (That averages to $8.50/month).

Our 2023-24 club annual fund giving is at $8,017, which is 85% of our $9,500 goal. Over the past few years, this goal has been supplemented by the Crab Feed’s Dessert Dash and Silent Auction.

Our member giving is currently at about 35%. Our goal is to get the number of members giving to 50%. The easiest way to give is through Rotary Direct, which allows members to schedule monthly, quarterly or annual donations to the foundation.

Members can also help with a one-time $25 donation. Simply let Michael know “I’m in for $25” and they will get set up to be billed with their dues.

The Rotary Foundation also includes the PolioPlus fund, which funds Rotary’s polio eradication initiative. This year, our PolioPlus giving is currently at $1,327, which is 44% of our $3,000 goal.

Michael went over the Paul Harris Fellow recognition program. Donors become Paul Harris Fellows when they earn 1,000 recognition points. This can be done by contributing $1,000 to eligible funds, by being given 1,000 recognition points by another donor, or a combination of the two. Paul Harris Fellows are recognized each year at the Crab Feed.

Here are some of the figures of Rotary Foundation giving for District 5100.

District 5100 – Rotarians Are Generous

• District 5100 is No. 1 per capita in the world in Rotary Direct donors at 546.
• The district has currently 494 Paul Harris Fellows.

District 5100 – How Did We Do in 2022-23

• 2,851 Current members
• Annual Fund/SHARE contributions: $735,267 – DOUBLE OUR GOAL!
• PolioPlus Contributions – $116,699 + 50% of our goal
• Every Rotarian Every Year (EREY) Donors: 1,251
• Sustaining Members: 1,085
• Average Annual Fund Per Capita Donation: $253

The Rotary Foundation amplifies Rotarian giving worldwide with the Forest Grove Rotary club giving impacting both local and international projects. Our club is on track to meet 2023-24 Rotary foundation giving goals for both the annual fund and PolioPlus.

We need roughly 7 more Rotarians to contribute $25+ to achieve our goal of 50% member participation rate. Please consider signing up for “Rotary Direct” or take advantage of our “I’m in for $25” campaign to be billed via email.

Thank you to Janet Peters for providing the recap of the program.

Club Calendar
Wed., Nov. 29: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Forest Grove United Church of Christ, 2032 College Way
Program: Emily Cupo, Stove Team International

Wed., Dec. 6: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Forest Grove United Church of Christ, 2032 College Way
Program: Forest Grove High School Music Programs

Wed., Dec. 13: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Forest Grove United Church of Christ, 2032 College Way
Program: Club Assembly

Wed., Dec. 13: Concours Committee Meeting, 7 p.m.
via Zoom. Contact Tom Rabbe for link.

Thurs., Dec. 14: Executive Board Meeting, 7 p.m.
via Zoom

Mon., Dec. 18: Hope for the Holidays Service Project, 4-5:30 p.m.
Forest Grove High School

Wed., Dec. 20: No Meeting

Thurs., Dec. 21: Board Meeting, 7 a.m.
via Zoom