We had a great meeting last week! There were 20 people attending including a visitor Cori Gurskey. Cori just recently moved to Sherwood Park and is interested in learning about our club and Rotary in general.

 

The big news is that we inducted 2 new members. Meagan Olive and Zahir Jiwa. Both have been attending our Zoom meetings for a few weeks and decided they are interested in the club long term.

 

In addition to the induction, Zahir gave a classification talk allowing us to learn more about him. Zahir was born and raised in Uganda until a coup. In 1972 all Asians were told to leave the country. Even though his father was a successful business man he had to leave all behind and the family landed in the U.K. with almost nothing. Zahir eventually graduated from the University of Wales in engineering. After his brother moved to Canada Zahir did as well. He successfully challenged APEGA exams and was recognized as a Professional Engineer in Alberta. Some years later he formed an engineering company called Rotaflow. It has evolved from a focus on instrumentation and controls to fire protection systems peaking at 130 emloyess down to 68 currently. This company has dealings with many of the petro-chemical and industrial plants in the area.

 

Zahir decided to join Rotary after a well thought out master plan for his life. We welcome him and hope he will help us develop and deliver plans for our community and the world.

 

Next week at our Zoom meeting Meagan will speak allowing us some insight to who she is.

 

 

President Elect Mike is putting together the leadership team for our new Rotary year. It will be a year of challenges for this community, the world and this club. If we wish to be relevant into the future we need figure out ways to adapt. When Mike calls you please give serious consideration to help the club help the community and the world.

 

 

The need is great even in our community so at a recent board meeting we voted to contribute $500 to the Food Bank. Our original plan was to conduct a food drive. We were going to ask individual Rotarians to help out donating and gathering needed food. That becomes risky in this environment hence the donation of money. As individuals you can still help out by purchasing Sobeys/Safeway gift cards from Erin Stephen then drop them off or mail them to the Food Bank. This helps out our Interact Club and the Food Bank. Information on how to contact Erin follows:

 

Rotarians can send Erin a text. 780-235-7465 Etransfer to erin.stephen@pwc.com It doesn’t require a password. She will arrange a convenient "contactless" drop off.

 

The address of the Strathcona Food Bank is:

255 Kaska Road

Sherwood Park, AB

T8A 4E8