Welcome to January, Vocational Service month for Rotary International. Vocational Service is Rotary’s second Avenue of Service. Its purpose is to promote high ethical standards in businesses and professions, recognize the worthiness of all dignified occupations, and foster the ideal of service in the pursuit of all vocations. Each Rotarian represents his or her particular business or profession in the Club and explores the ideals of Rotary in the workplace. One ideal is the Four-Way Test. Practical applications include: open and honest communication, treating people fairly and with dignity, encouraging diversity of opinion, recognizing achievements and being accountable for our own actions.
And it’s Vocational Service Month in District 7430. Let’s ask how we can serve our businesses and professions. Let’s show our communities what Rotary stands for and why. Let’s share our ethical commitment with colleagues and Rotarians. Let’s continue classification talks by new members and discuss business ethics. Consider sponsoring Career Day for young people. Let’s put our vocational skills to work for
Get ready, Rotarians! Your club is invited to join in on a special “Rotary Day of Service.”
On April 30, Rotary Clubs, Interact Clubs and Rotaract Clubs throughout the District will be serving their communities to support Rotary’s seventh and newest Area of Focus – Protecting the Environment. Think of ways your Club can join in the fun and do an environmental project on that day. Wouldn't it be great to have all 46 Rotary Clubs join with Rotaractors and Interactors working on individual environmental projects on the same day?
You might consider partnering with environmental organizations, conservancies, watershed groups, schools, Interact and Rotaract clubs, youth groups, municipalities, or another Rotary Club. The Rotary Day of Service guidelines require us to work together.
While the service project should be focused on the environment, we also view this day as a wonderful opportunity to boost your club’s membership. Invite non-Rotarians to join in the fun. The Rotary Day of Service guidelines require us to invite 25 percent of each project team from outside Rotary.
The Environmental Sustainability Team just unveiled its own webpages on this site. Check out these pages for ideas on how to get started and how to get your Club members excited about performing a meaningful project in your community that will have positive environmental benefits.
Please click on the images below to review the PDFs of this month's two Showcase Tuesday talks. Members of the district's Public Image Team (Amy Sheller, Marlene Greenman Heller and Lou Bottitta) shared some creative ideas about how to use vocational skills and personal passions to serve others and Rotary. Kutztown Club President Tom Kulp, spoke on the 84-year history of Farmer's Night (which was featured in Rotary magazine).
When passion and raw determination are added to the miracle of modern vaccines, great things happen. Over the last 30 years, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative have seen the reduction of polio cases worldwide, by 99.9 percent. The entire world celebrated in 2020, when the continent of Africa was declared free of the wild poliovirus. As we begin a new year, the children of two countries where the wild poliovirus still circulates (Afghanistan and Pakistan) are still vulnerable to this terrible disease. As long as it still circulates anywhere in the world, children in the US are still vulnerable and must continue to be vaccinated.
Over the last two years, the world has seen unsurpassed death and illness from yet another virus. In reading the Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation Position Statement on COVID-19 Vaccination, I am reminded that we have even more work to do. Here we are today, with more than 800,000 American deaths as a result of COVID-19. As a Rotary member and polio survivor, I am particularly aware of the important role vaccines play in halting the spread of disease. With that in mind, we must continue to support polio immunization efforts around the world, just as we continue to support the effort to mitigate COVID-19.
We are sharing fact-based vaccination information – as Rotarians throughout our state and our Network support our PA Immunization Coalition(s). We are speaking out about the realities of life after experiencing the effects of a vaccine preventable disease, encouraging blood donations and distributing packets of vaccine information and resources to daycare centers, pediatricians and hospitals that encourage vaccine acceptance. We still have a lot to do.
Engage with your Rotary Club to learn more about how you can get involved as a partner supporting these efforts in your community. We are doing this not only for ourselves, but for future generations.
We have witnessed the truth first hand. Vaccines Work!
Interested in meeting other district Rotarians in a fun way and share ideas and passions for Rotary? Come join us! We’ve been to Hawk Mountain, Peace Park, Michener Museum and Longwood Gardens. Recommendations of locations or suggestions are welcome.
There are also plans underway for a virtual cultural exchange with India. There are no set dates as of yet. The next "Club to Club" meet up will be in March or April; contact coordinator Dee Eng if interested in being put on the email list for either of these events.
The team is also hoping to restart Rotary Friendship Exchanges (RFEs). There's nothing specific to share yet, but you can Click here to learn more about RFEs.
The STEM YEA Big Ticket Reverse Raffle Night is rescheduled to April 30, 2022, at the Indian Valley Country Club. Terry Hart, former NASA astronaut, will speak about his life and decision to pursue a STEM career. Terry served as a shuttle mission specialist and logged 168 hours in space. He said to Lehigh University graduates,“Throughout your careers, you will have many opportunities to be a member of a team focused on accomplishing something very new and challenging.” A diverse and multidisciplinary team will bring the STEM YEA program to fruition and we are gratified to receive his support.
Ticketsare still available but only 200 will be sold. Your ticket will help to fund the STEM YEA program for under-served middle schoolers. The ticket has a base price of $125 and entitles you to a fun evening including hors d'oeuvres, drinks, dinner and a lottery ticket with a chance to win one of numerous prizes totaling up to $5000. Purchase your tickets now at https://stemyea2022specialevent.eventbrite.com
For this month’s theme, we can find many examples of why this topic is so important just by glancing at a newspaper, social media page, cable news channel or even listening to conversations at a coffee shop. The goal is not to jump onto one side or the other and persuade people to share your opinion, but rather, to leave room for other opinions and learn to listen with an open mind, agree to disagree, and walk away as friends.
What can you do to connect with the theme in your club? Here are a few suggestions to get you started. Use these as a starting point and come up with some of your own.
Invite past Peace Fellows to speak to your club. (This could be a Zoom presentation.)
Invite a member from a local interfaith council to talk about conflict resolution
Host a panel for the community to attend with a speaker from each of the main ethnic groups in your community, to discuss ways their cultures can/do interact peacefully
Involve veterans in your club in discussions of the importance of peace vs. conflict
Consider honoring a member of a peacekeeping force in your community in some way (i.e., police chief, military, any person who your club is aware of who serves the public)
Encourage an Interact Club to create a peace project in their school. Let the students choose the project, with your club acting as mentors.
Watch for an invitation to attend a Showcase on Peace, and Conflict Prevention in District 7430. Open to all Rotarians, it will have great information for everyone to use.
Vocational Service month is a reminder that Rotarians are obligated to share their professional skills. Our Code of Conduct states that Rotarians:
“Use professional skills to: mentor young people, help those with special needs, and improve people’s quality of life in my community and in the world.”
Many of our Rotary Club projects require diverse skills. The STEM-YEA project is one example. This team is developing a four-day, three-night residential STEM Academy to be held at Albright College. “Astrobiology: The Search for Life on Mars,” is the theme, with a target date for the inaugural event of July 8-11, 2022. Our team’s mission is to provide an engaging STEM experience for under-served middle schoolers in our five-county Rotary footprint. The goal is for this experience to encourage students to choose STEM courses and careers.
Ten clubs from throughout District 7430 have members on this team, sharing their vocations in the best way possible: to engage, entertain, and excite young people. Scientists, educators, medical, and business people are sharing their professional knowledge and passions, which will demonstrate the way all these diverse skills join together to create a successful project.
It’s not necessary to be a multi-year Rotarian to share your professional skills. Two members of the STEM-YEA team are relatively new to Rotary. Dr. Kathleen Ott, a former school administrator and member of the Allentown West Rotary Club has been a Rotary member for less than two years. Dr. Ott serves on the Fundraising as well as Curriculum Development teams. Dr. Robin Burk joined the Bethlehem Club less than a year ago and leads the configuration management effort.
Volunteers are still needed for the STEM YEA team who can provide marketing expertise with the Academy. We want to share our mission and message throughout our five counties. This is an opportunity to expose our local communities to Rotary District 7430.
Volunteers are also needed July 8-11, during the Academy, ensuring our student participants’ safety while on the campus. If you enjoy being with young people and sharing their excitement as they build rovers, helicopters and landers, please be in touch! Contact Mike Orbin, STEM-YEA chair (morbin@ptd.net), or Gwenn Carr at gwenn.carr@verizon.net for more information.
Focusing on VOCATION; the 4th Object of Rotary encourages and fosters the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise to encourage and foster the advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons united in the ideal of service… This is the core value of our Rotary Foundation’s Vocational Training Teams. Rotary’s Vocational Training Team (VTT) program, started in 2014, is funded by the Rotary Foundation’s Global Grant Program. VTT’s are groups of professionals who travel abroad either to teach local professionals about a particular field or to learn more about their own. But the VTT has to be in one of the now 7 Areas of Focus.
In 2013, I was an Asst. Regional Rotary Foundation Coordinator, after serving as our own district’s Rotary Foundation Chair. With the Rotary Foundation’s “New Grant Models,” the VTT was started in order to replace the more “social” Group Study Exchange. As such, I decided to organize our district’s first VTT in order to learn how VTT’s are organized and conducted.
Maternal and Child Health Area of Focus was the area selected for our district’s first VTT, based on my introduction to my son’s medical school advising professor, Dr. Owen Montgomery of Drexel University’s College of Medicine. Dr. Montgomery, an OB/Gyn doctor, totally signed onto the idea of such a VTT and with his help, we recruited doctors, nurse and midwife faculty along with computer and information technology faculty from other Drexel Colleges. The VTT focused on developing systems for training Uganda Health Centers Midwives in Basic Emergency Obstetrics and Newborn Care, aimed at reducing the high mortality rated in Uganda of mothers and newborns during delivery. Further, the VTT and the project were to develop the basics for training remotely using distance education for learning online and improving training resources to support continuing education.
There have been three Global Grants now on this topic hosted by the Kampala North Rotary Club with Blue Bell Rotary Club as the International partner. The grants went from initially $85,00, then $130,000 and finally $225,000, supporting multiple two-way exchanges (Uganda team coming to Drexel/D-7430, in Spring 2015) as well as additional one-way VTTs where Drexel faculty visited and trained at four Health Centers in Uganda as well as at Makerere University in Kampala. Overall, twenty-five faculty, midwives and other professionals have exchanged; all funded by the Rotary Foundation.
To help the District recognize the Public Image (PI) efforts of our clubs and to encourage new and expanded "story telling" by our clubs and members, we will be rolling out the 2022 version of the Governor's Public Image Challenge this month. Details will be communicated to Club Presidents and PI Chairs over the next few weeks. Then, every month from February through June, the D7430 PI Team will share a different challenge designed to encourage clubs to stretch their PI muscles in the areas of branding, social media, video and/or newsletter communications.
Although the Challenge will be coordinated and focused at the club leadership level, all Rotarians have a role to play in Public Image. As a Rotarian, you’re also a brand ambassador. You can tell your Rotary "People of Action" stories of Rotary locally among friends, family and neighbors
Our stories of "Service Above Self" are being told in new ways today via social media, text, video and more. How we share it with the world is vital to the future of Rotary clubs everywhere. Through a unified Rotary image and a clear, compelling voice, we are enhancing our legacy as one of the most respected organizations in the world.
Chart Your Course and Set Your Sails for the District Conference scheduled April 22-24, 2022 at the Hershey Lodge.
You can register on the website at Rotaryathershey2022.org. This is about Rotary fellowship with friends from Districts 7450 and 7475.
Join the crew for a weekend to reinvigorate our post-COVID clubs, see old friends, and make new ones over chocolate and more chocolate... Bon voyage for a great Rotary trip!
orthiness of all dignified occupations, and foster the ideal of service in the pursuit of all vocations. Each Rotarian represents his or her particular business or profession in the Club and explores the ideals of Rotary in the workplace. One ideal is the Four-Way Test. Practical applications include: open and honest communication, treating people fairly and with dignity, encouraging diversity of opinion, recognizing achievements and being accountable for our own actions.
When passion and raw determination are added to the miracle of modern vaccines, great things happen. Over the last 30 years, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative have seen the reduction of polio cases worldwide, by 99.9 percent. The entire world celebrated in 2020, when the continent of Africa was declared free of the wild poliovirus. As we begin a new year, the children of two countries where the wild poliovirus still circulates (Afghanistan and Pakistan) are still vulnerable to this terrible disease. As long as it still circulates anywhere in the world, children in the US are still vulnerable and must continue to be vaccinated.
Interested in meeting other district Rotarians in a fun way and share ideas and passions for Rotary? Come join us! We’ve been to Hawk Mountain, Peace Park, Michener Museum and Longwood Gardens. Recommendations of locations or suggestions are welcome.
The STEM YEA Big Ticket Reverse Raffle Night is rescheduled to April 30, 2022, at the Indian Valley Country Club. Terry Hart, former NASA astronaut, will speak about his life and decision to pursue a STEM career. Terry served as a shuttle mission specialist and logged 168 hours in space. He said to Lehigh University graduates,“Throughout your careers, you will have many opportunities to be a member of a team focused on accomplishing something very new and challenging.” A diverse and multidisciplinary team will bring the STEM YEA program to fruition and we are gratified to receive his support.
For this month’s theme, we can find many examples of why this topic is so important just by glancing at a newspaper, social media page, cable news channel or even listening to conversations at a coffee shop. The goal is not to jump onto one side or the other and persuade people to share your opinion, but rather, to leave room for other opinions and learn to listen with an open mind, agree to disagree, and walk away as friends.
Many of our Rotary Club projects require diverse skills. The STEM-YEA project is one example. This team is developing a four-day, three-night residential STEM Academy to be held at Albright College. “Astrobiology: The Search for Life on Mars,” is the theme, with a target date for the inaugural event of July 8-11, 2022. Our team’s mission is to provide an engaging STEM experience for under-served middle schoolers in our five-county Rotary footprint. The goal is for this experience to encourage students to choose STEM courses and careers.
Maternal and Child Health Area of Focus was the area selected for our district’s first VTT, based on my introduction to my son’s medical school advising professor, Dr. Owen Montgomery of Drexel University’s College of Medicine. Dr. Montgomery, an OB/Gyn doctor, totally signed onto the idea of such a VTT and with his help, we recruited doctors, nurse and midwife faculty along with computer and information technology faculty from other Drexel Colleges. The VTT focused on developing systems for training Uganda Health Centers Midwives in Basic Emergency Obstetrics and Newborn Care, aimed at reducing the high mortality rated in Uganda of mothers and newborns during delivery. Further, the VTT and the project were to develop the basics for training remotely using distance education for learning online and improving training resources to support continuing education.
hallenge will be coordinated and focused at the club leadership level, all Rotarians have a role to play in Public Image. As a Rotarian, you’re also a brand ambassador. You can tell your Rotary "People of Action" stories of Rotary locally among friends, family and neighbors 
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