Thank you to everyone who helped us have two wonderful discussions at our last two Club Assemblies. We have made some awesome progress and I just want to highlight a few of those items. I am working to get our club more in compliance with our own club constitution and bylaws. We addressed the first issue by having an election of our current officers and board members and then at the second assembly added in another director at large to the board. Thank you for helping make this happen! And thanks to those volunteering in club roles!

 

The second issue of compliance is that the board is required to provide a financial accounting at the end of each year in a club meeting. This also includes a presentation of the Ripon Rotary Club Foundation finances as well. We are planning on doing this by the end of the fiscal year which for our club runs from July 1 to June 30^th. We will be looking to do something at the end of June in 2024 and plan to make this an annual event to help us with decisions regarding club and community projects.

 

From concerns brought forth at the first assembly, we realized that we needed to clarify the clubs operating expenses and brought that information to the second meeting. Kelly and I are also working with the board to put together a budget to present to the club that will include all our operating expenses and the expenses of the programs for the community we facilitate such as the STRIVE program, the Youth Exchange program, and the Imagination Library.

 

In working on our club finances, we presented where we were at in terms of what our dues brought in - which haven’t been raised in over ten years - and how far behind they were in covering our operating expenses for the club. After a good discussion and a presentation of where we need to be to have our dues cover these expenses and not use fundraised money to cover them, the club members unanimously approved to raise our dues from the current $180 per member to the new amount of $250 per member starting in January still divided out in two bills per year.

 

What initiated our conversation was the presentation to the club of three different requests to help the Ripon community. The first request was to pay for one complete table, chair, umbrella set for under the pergola at the green space in downtown Ripon. The cost for this project is $5,500 and we voted unanimously to do this using club assets in our bank account.

 

The second request that became a part of our conversation was to create a campaign whereby club members would donate through our foundation for a certain time and the money would be matched by the club or foundation funds and sent to Ripon library remodel project. This does not exclude us from instead choosing to simply give a gift to the library. This item is on hold as club members want better information on what is in our foundation, how much is restricted by our rules and how much is restricted by the rules of the Oshkosh foundation that oversees our assets.

 

The third request that became a part of our conversation was to give a large gift to the Boys and Girls club building which will begin construction soon. As a club, we have not given any significant gifts to any major projects in the city for a long time. We were focused on the dam construction project for years in Panama, but that project has now been completed. We have been asked to consider donating from our club and foundation assets in the future of our young people through the boys and girls club of $100,000. This request was also put on hold as club members would like a better information on what is in our foundation, how much is restricted by our rules and how much is restricted by the rules of the Oshkosh foundation that oversees our assets.

 

Our board along with the foundation board are working to get the most accurate information we can so that the information can be presented to the club, and we can decide how to move forward with our two tabled requests.

As we have been discussing these requests and our finances as a club, we have become aware of how much our fundraising efforts have shrunk over the past five years. After taking care of our committed program expenses that need to be funded through our fundraising, we are left with on average about $6-7,000 a year to put in our foundation or use to help community groups who come to us. We need to work in adding new fundraisers, improving our current fundraisers, and adding new members all of which increase our ability to positively impact the people of greater Ripon, Wisconsin.  

 

The board has also opened back up its search for a better location for our club meetings as we are finding the ambient sound at Aromas to be too distracting to the point at which we cannot hear our guest speakers. In our survey a couple of the key components we wanted was handicap access, which eliminates quite a few places. We have also learned that to do catering is a problem in a couple of ways: volunteers are needed to order food and to take care of all leftover food each week; our food costs go up as we must base our costs on RSVP’s; and it makes it hard to accommodate quests. We were able to meet on the back deck on August 30 and that helped with the noise but is not a permanent solution. We will communicate as best we can when moving to other places - please watch the Ripon Rotary website https://www.riponrotary.com/for information on speakers and locations. Or, if you have the ClubRunner app (found on the Apple App Store or Google Play) loaded on your phone, just click on Events for more information.