Charles City Rotary Club begins evening satellite club

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Looking to be part of a service club to socialize and help the community, but the typical weekly noon meetings don’t fit with your schedule?

The Charles City Rotary Club is hoping a new twice-monthly evening satellite club is just what you’re looking for.

Rotary Club member John Ebert, a former Charles City club president and currently the Rotary district assistant governor, said the idea of a less-structured club that meets evenings has been kicked around for several years, at least since he was president in 2014-15.

Staci Ackerson, also a current member and past president, said the idea is to give people who aren’t able to make the club’s weekly Monday noon meetings an opportunity to be part of Rotary and the club’s focus on service.

“This gives an after-hours time for those to hopefully be able to make that work,” she said.

Ebert said people who join through the satellite club will be full Rotary members, but would save some on the cost because they wouldn’t have to pay for the noon lunches.

Rotary members will be able to attend either the noon or the evening meetings, although, Ebert said, it’s likely most people will gravitate to one or the other.

“We’re all members of the same club,” he said.

Veronica Litterer, a club member and also a past president, said the current schedule for the evening meetings is the first and third Tuesday of every month at the Pub on the Cedar, with socializing beginning about 5:15 p.m. and the meeting starting about 5:30.

The next meeting will be tonight (Tuesday).

The plan is for the evening meetings to be less structured, Ackerson said.

“It’s less traditional. Not a lot of this standing up and so on and reciting and things like that,” she said.

“The way we see it is it’s going to be a group of like-minded service folks that like to share their time and talents and give assistance and be a service club, and kind of pick and choose their own areas that are near and dear to them,” Ackerson said.

Ebert said, “They can either piggyback onto things the noon club is doing, or have ideas that they want to do on their own. If they have ideas that they want assistance with, they have a lot of resources that are available to them.”

So far there have been only a couple of the evening meetings held.

Ackerson said the attendance has been low, and they’re hoping that spreading the word will build participation.

“It’s going to take a little bit of time to get enough people to come in consistently and call it part of their every-other-week schedule,” she said.

Litterer said club members have been reaching out to people who they think might be interested, including former members who could no longer attend the noon meetings because their schedules changed.

Ebert said there really isn’t a timetable for getting the satellite club established.

“I would look at it as open-ended,” he said.

Other Rotary clubs have had success starting satellite clubs along the same format, in communities the size of Charles City, Ebert said.

“I think part of the appeal to this is it’s not weekly. It’s a little less frequent,” he said.

Eventually the evening group will probably select a chairperson to organize meetings, but much of the format and structure will be up to the people who attend, the current members said.

“I just encourage anyone who has any interest to stop in and see if it’s something they might like to do,” Ebert said.