East Coast Bays Rotary Profile
East Cost Bays Rotary Club was started in 1972 with around 25 members. Now there are around 50 members from all walks of life. The club is very active both in the community and in the wider Rotary world.
We meet every Monday evening around 6.00pm at Pupuke Golf Club, East Coast Road, Campbells Bay. It’s a great venue overlooking the Gulf with plenty of parking and an excellent meal. Meetings are based around a drink and a meal and usually followed by a speaker. Meetings are always friendly and welcoming.
Rotary Club Membership, including East Coast Bays, represents a cross-section of the community. Members include a 20 something recently returned Exchange Student, teachers, computer developers, estate agents, surveyors, financial advisors and many more. We are not all lawyers and bank managers. We don’t wear suits.
Rotary is a Service Club. We help others both in the North Shore Community and around the world. Everything from pulling weeds in a local reserve to eradicating Polio so we get around. Everyone in the club helps (it’s part of being a Rotarian) but no one is asked to do any more than they want.
The Aims of the club are:
- To join through Fellowship, business and professional people united in the ideal of service.
- To provide Members with the opportunity to serve and work for the needs of others, and to improve the quality of life in East Coast Bays and the wider Community.
We are part of District 9910, which takes in the areas of West Auckland, North Shore, Northland, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Norfolk Island.
Since we started, East Coast Bays Rotary has raised in excess of $2.0 million for local, national and international projects and charities.
What do we do?
Well, many things. Some are small and under the radar like school uniforms for families in need, all the way to helping eradicate Polio from the world. Here is just a taste of what we have done recently,.
Community
The local projects and community committee focuses mainly on local events and initiatives. Some really small but even the small ones make a big difference to the people we are helping. Others are bigger and are collaborations with either the greater Rotary District or schools and so on.
Recently we have supported
Literacy projects such as book in homes and books in prisons. There are a lot of people out there who struggle to read and that’s pretty tough in the 21st century. We have been supporting dictionaries for kids, for some children, it’s the only book in the household.
Following on from this we support reading assistance programs in Sherwood and we want to expand this program to other schools in the area.
Staying with kids, we help with the Trees for survival programme at Murrays Bay School. Here primary school student grow and then plant native trees.
Moving out to wider New Zealand we help financially with the District Dental Hygiene programme where packs of tooth brushes and paste are distributed to low decile schools in the Far North and on the North Shore.
There are a bunch of other things that come up through the year, some we support some we don’t – we don’t have a money tree. It’s worth asking though, if you have a community need, talk to us, we may not say yes but we will listen.
