Club member Brenna Baucum spent the weekend traveling for Rotary and is back with a brief summary of her experience:
“Berkeley is warm in August. Muggy, in fact. It was on the university campus that I joined 52 other young professionals to experience the inaugural West Coast Young Professional Summit. This idea was started and funded on a national level by two Rotarians who wanted to find out how Rotary can better meet the needs of young professionals. Last year, an initial Young Professional (YP) summit was held in Chicago and of that, a few motivated YP’s started the ball rolling to launch one on the west coast.
In Chicago, only YP’s attended this conference. They found that as they took ideas back to their respective clubs, they were met with resistance. So, for the west coast summit, the organizers insisted that members of leadership join their YP representatives.
We spent the first day apart, YP’s in one areas of campus and district leadership in another. We independently brainstormed, taking the orthodoxies (aka, the “sacred cows” of Rotary) and discussing the why behind each. Day two brought the two groups together; we spent time collaborating, then broke out into our individual districts to talk about action items and baby steps we can take to implement change on a local level.
I recognize my bias, but I am particularly proud of our district’s ability to come up with innovative and creative ideas to help make Rotary and even better organization than it is today. We are fortunate to have such open-minded, ‘outside the box’ thinkers on our leadership team. I look forward to sharing some of those ideas at the District Membership Training on September 12, and more of my takeaways at an upcoming program with our members.”