Keynote Speaker this past Tuesday
Carolyn Ferguson was visiting the Central Okanagan the early part of this past week and was able to be our keynote speaker at our meeting on Tuesday. She is a Rotary fulltime staff member working in Zone 24 which covers some sixteen districts across Canada, Eastern Russia, Parts of USA and the two French Islands off of the east coast. Her position title is Major Gifts Officer.
She covered a lot of ground, primarily about the work that Rotary is able to do word wide as a result of the support given to The Rotary Foundation by members of clubs like ours.
She keyed in on the Six Areas of Focus that Rotary has developed and emphasized all six with a Power Point. She also highlighted the direction that Global and District Grants are taking which will ensure that whichever Area of Focus we choose, the current grants programs will ensure continuous benefit.
The six Areas are: -
- Peace and conflict prevention/resolution
- Disease prevention and treatment
- Water and sanitation
- Maternal & child health
- Basic education and literacy
- Economic and community development
Carolyn also touched on the significant contribution that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made to The Rotary Foundation and continues to make towards our effort to eliminate Polio. She gave us some figures about the number of Rotarians world wide that contribute to our foundation and pointed out that only 2% of the dollars collected as annual gifts are used for program expenditures and only 8% are used for fund raising expenditures.