PRESIDENT SAYS
Next week we are meeting with the Rotary Club of Deep Water Point, at the annex next to the Dome Café. Please order and pay for your own beverage and breakfast on arrival, using your name and Rotary to help ensure you are reunited with your order. Please also bring the meeting fee of $5 to pay as you check in at the adjacent annex.
Thank you Lesley for hosting our recent monthly Sundowner. Our next one will be a special one to welcome new Club members.
Happy birthday to Peta Williams and Noeleen Mazza this week and also to our guest speaker Steve Rushforth PHF.
I am very pleased with the support members are giving to the Silver Teapot - $164.80 raised the first three months of 2019.
HAPPY DOLLARS
Gotta love footy season – not a bad idea to follow an interstate team as supporters of the Dockers and Eagles are fair game every week from now until the end of August! We banked $40 today!
STEVE RUSHFORTH – THIS IS MY LIFE!
Past President Steve Rushforth joined Rotary in Wyalkatchem in 1998 and transferred to the new Canning Bridge Rotary soon after he moved to Perth. He was president of Canning Bridge in 2012-13.
Steve spent 24 wonderful years as a teacher, Deputy Principal and Principal and really only gave it away when it stopped being fun, almost suffocating with the steadily increasing bureaucracy. Steve trained as a Physical Education teacher, a natural progression for him as his life had become defined by sport from his teenage years – cricket, basketball, badminton, skiing, and later golf and lawn bowls, - just to name a few!
His two children have followed suit – Casey is a graduate from San Francisco State University where she had a water polo scholarship, and is preparing for a life as a teacher in WA, while younger brother Ben is a Sports Physiotherapy student who plays football for Claremont.
Steve shared lots of memories including the time he arrived to take up the Deputy Principal position at Fitzroy Crossing, on the last plane to land for 3 weeks. The Fitzroy River had flooded and became the second largest river in the world for a time, second only to the Amazon in South America.
After leaving the education department, Steve joined a family friend’s private company and oversaw a range of business ventures, but sadly his friend grew ill and died, and the company folded. Steve’s Plan A did not include being out of work at 55.
Fortunately Steve had been volunteering for the Fathering Project, founded by Dr Bruce Robinson, a lung cancer specialist (see Footnote).
When the Fathering Project began to expand, Steve moved from being a volunteer to employment as the coordinator of the Fathering Project’s school programs in WA. They are currently in 140 Primary Schools, including nearly all the schools Applecross Rotary supports with the Microscopes-in-Schools program. Steve plans to add another 60 schools in 2019.
Meanwhile a recent $5.4m grant from the Federal Government will see the program expand nationally. The goal is for every child to have a father or father-figure in their life.
It begins with a men-only meeting of Dads at the local primary school to encourage them to talk about being a good or better father and then reaching out to the children who don’t currently have a father figure in their life.
FOOTNOTE: THE FATHERING PROJECT
In his work as a cancer specialist, Dr Bruce Robinson has told hundreds of men that they only had a short time left to live. For too many of these men, regret was a key reaction – “I wish I had spent more time with my family/with my children”. Bruce realised that there was a need for fathers to, as he puts it, “learn to live richly at the front end so you don’t have regrets at the back end” – in other words, to learn how to build those relationships with the family and improve that work/life balance so that down the track they don’t wish things could have been different.
I am writing to you on behalf of Max Bird, Kwinana Rotary Club, Team Leader for the Timor Leste Water project. This Water Project was presented at the recent District Conference in Collie by Max resulting in many questions and interest from many. For the past ten years Max, with the assistance of other Rotarians have been delivering clean fresh water to many remote villages in the mountainous areas of Timor Leste.
