 The Rotary Club of Aberdeen St MacharAbout Us
Rotary is a worldwide organization of business and professional leaders that provides humanitarian service, encourages high ethical standards in all vocations, and helps build goodwill and peace in the world. Approximately 1.2 million Rotarians belong to more than 31,000 Rotary clubs located in 167 countries. The Rotary Club of Aberdeen St. Machar was granted its Charter on 14th November 1961, an event marked by a celebration dinner held on that date at the Northern Hotel, Aberdeen. The Club had an initial membership of 27, and meetings were held every Thursday at the Northern Hotel from 1961 until the hotel closed down in 1993. The Club then moved its location to the Palm Court Hotel, but returned to the Northern after it’s reopening where meetings are held every Thursday lunchtime at 12.45pm. The Club will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary in 2011.
The Club has gone from strength to strength over the years and likes to put down it’s success to the friendly and congenial atmosphere that is always apparent at weekly meetings, contributing greatly to a sense of real friendship and fellowship. The Club is extremely proud of its achievements over the years, mainly through involvement with local causes and community related activities. As well as providing practical assistance to a variety of local projects, some over a long period of time, the Club also prides itself on numerous fundraising activities, which have raised tens of thousands of pounds for good causes. In addition to carrying out its charitable activities, the Club enjoys a busy sporting and social calendar throughout the year, giving members the opportunity to meet wives, partners or fellow Rotarians from other clubs. Amongst the sporting activities, there is particularly strong interest in Golf, Bowling and Curling, and the Club also enjoys competing in the annual Gavel Challenge. In addition to the weekly meetings with guest speakers, the club does a variety of other more social events such as quiz nights, weekends away, theatre evenings and visits to some of the historic and more interesting buildings in Aberdeen. But perhaps the Club’s greatest success lies in its ability to offer members a variety of opportunities to put themselves at the service of others. What We Do
The Rotary Club of Aberdeen St. Machar has, over the years, involved itself with a large and varied number of projects, both locally and overseas.
The club participates in many of the Rotary International projects such as the End Polio Now campaign. Each year we also send aid to the poorer areas of Eastern Europe in the form of the Rotary “Shoe Box” gift scheme. The Shelter Box organisation is another international relief scheme we work with and the club helps send these vital survival kits to countries where needed such as Haiti in 2008 and the Indonesian Tsunami in 2009. On a local level club members give support to St.Machar Academy where there is a lively Rotary Interact Club, and we regularly present Dictionaries for Life to final year students. The club also has a strong involvement in the local swimming gala held for disabled youngsters from local schools. Along with other clubs, we help with the annual Kids Out day at Craibstone for youngsters with learning difficulties. The club and members also support the “Give Kids a Chance” project, The Reading Bus project and other worthy causes such as the local CLAN and UCAN charities. Many club members take on personal projects which can be at home or overseas, but somewhere there is a need to be met.
To enable these projects to be funded, the Club members are continually involved in a range in successful fundraising activities. These included an annual sponsored Golf Event, coffee mornings, quiz nights, sponsored race nights as well as participating in the very successful Aberdeen and North East Rotary Clubs annual Grand Prize Draw.
Meeting up with other clubs is always a help in sharing ideas and members are encouraged to visit other local clubs or when away anywhere, see if there is a Rotary club near. The club also likes to be active in Rotary affairs and members attend district and national conferences. We have also had the honour to have club member Bill Wood become District Governor in 1998 and Alan Pirie is Assistant District Governor in 2010-2011.
For more information on the Rotary Movement go to:
Email us at webmaster@stmachar.org.uk
|
