Picking up speed again, except Rotaract

As life in Beijing is basically back to normal, our Rotary Club of Beijing is active thanks to the efforts of PE Didier.
The club is also trying to attract new blood and I am happy to see we have more interest from people from Latin America, among others.
Rotaract is still struggling as many of its members can’t yet return to Beijing, but we try our best under the conditions.

We look back at times like when we had a well-attended hotpot with the Rotaractors on 18 December 2019, in Ritan Dong Lu.

Last year we kept in touch with the Rotaract Club of Beijing West by ZOOM. They still organize this year online events. The Sanlitun club has restarted meetings, like this one in SOHO Sanlitun.

On 22 December 2020 we had our Rotary dinner in Morel’s Restaurant and our Rotaractors Kien and Trefyn also joined.

Rotary lunch 2 March

Our lunch of 2 March 2021 in Kempinski hotel was presided by PE Didier, our President Elect. It was his first event as Club President filling in for Rtn Danny, our 2020-2021 President, who is relocating to Nanjing.
No speaker but Didier gave some feedback to the members present, as well as new potential members, after yesterday’s Club Board meeting.
The project HOPE, introduced by Rtn Helen was approved. As a result the active projects of our Club are HOPE and hypospadias. The Bethel project is still waiting for better times. A project to teach English in Hebei schools is being considered where members of Rotary and Rotaract could act as volunteers.
HOPE is an initiative to help children with mental disabilities to improve their mental and physical condition through special riding lessons. The specially trained horses and the qualified therapists use the horses for the children to open up. The contact with the animals have a proven therapeutic effect.

Didier also appealed for members to come forward and help in taking up roles in the different committees of the Club. Several positions need to be filled such as treasurer and membership chair. New committees are in the pipeline such as events committee (includes the speaker program). On the Rotary International website we can find the job description of most common positions and committees.

More details about hypospadias, see this earlier post with the details: https://www.beijing1980.com/2017/04/13/hypospadias-surgeries-need-support/

Rotary dinner 9 March

Tuesday 9 March at 7 pm we met in Morel’s Restaurant and we had an interesting speaker Tilman Rieger. He is a Shanghai Rotary Club member and also introduced Tilman Tillmann to our Club.  He is the founder and CEO of 8C Consulting, Executive Coaching and related.

He talked about Conflict Management in Relationships. “Know yourself, understand your counterpart, communicate more effectively!”