This remarkable year+ of the pandemic has forced many changes on everyone, including us in the Rotary Club. We’re still doing our regular luncheons and hosting incredible speakers, but now via Zoom. We continue to raise and invest money for great local causes, but we’ve been forced to curtail our fun public events, like last year’s July 4th Parade and fireworks and September 2020’s Mt. Baldhead Challenge. We launched the Boys & Girls Club after-school programs in January, but on a limited basis within the safety constraints of the Douglas Elementary School.
Flexibility, positivity, and perseverance have been Rotary’s touchstones during these long months of the pandemic. As vaccination counts rise, we dare hope that we may be able to start up “Rotary 2.0” soon—still dedicated to “creating positive lasting change in our towns, in our world, and in ourselves” but also now with much more energy and creative adaptability!
As an example, Rotary international recently elevated Environmental Stewardship specifically as one of its key global focal areas. Of course, that’s great news for Saugatuck-Douglas. Our economy, quality of life, and reason for being are all intertwined with a healthy and thriving ecosystem. Our Club immediately responded to this change in priority by seeking and gaining from the Rotary Foundation a grant of $5000 to match our local commitment of another $7250 to help support the Tri-Community Recycling Committee’s reintroduction of the Household Hazardous Waste Disposal service. Rotary’s gift of $12,250 helped offset the costs of responsible and safe disposal of a lot of household “nasty stuff” that might otherwise foul our ground water and, eventually, the river, harbor and lake.
These grants we receive from our “mothership” in Chicago are incremental resources to help our towns thrive. We are grateful to keep the fires stoked in an organization that not only can solve local problems with local effort, but that also can be a conduit for help from afar.
A final thought: if you are re-thinking what a post-pandemic “return to normal” might look like for you and your family, please consider some active form of service as part of your “new normal.” Helping others and being a part of building back our communities is the best way we know of to transform languishing to flourishing in our shared life after we crush COVID together.
