Last Wednesday 7th of October, after enjoying our regular meeting the previous day as detailed below, nine of our members participated in an interesting District Cluster meeting with some of the local Rotary Clubs. This in fact involved 10 Rotary Clubs .
Such a meeting showed yet another change in our activity while in lockdown . It appears that Zoom is increasing our ability to get involved in more meetings including communicating with our neighbouring Rotary Clubs .
This meeting involved the 2 Gateway Clusters. Our Gateway West included our Keilor Club and the Keilor East Rotary, Brunswick Tullamarine and the Melbourne Passport Club
The list from the other Gateway group included Essendon Rotary, Essendon North Flemington/Kensington, Footscray, West Footscray and the the Gateway Rotaract Club
All were on the screen except for Essendon North as this was the evening of their regular meeting
Assistant Governor Michael Donnelly, member of the Keilor East Rotary Club chaired the meeting and District Governor Philip Archer was in attendance of course
There were 58 participants and our Rotary Club of Keilor proudly had 9 members present.
Each Club gave a report which highlighted the performance of their club while coping with lockdown condition.
Interestingly while everyone appeared on Zoom Some of the participants were located out of Melbourne while taking part
Despite some of the Clubs having small membership they surprised us with the great range of projects they manage to achieve – One Club achieved 7 projects with a small membership.
We were reminded that the Passport Club achieved its projects with overseas participation.
It was also a pleasure to see the president of Essendon Rotary Club David Abbey who is the son of our famous Royce Abbey past RI president
We now realise that the benefit of having such cluster meetings is to learn about other Clubs to share ideas, learn new ways and create opportunities to do things differently