OPEN FORUM: MV Rotary Needs Helping Hands

By SUZY BENNETT

Moapa Valley Rotary President

If a survey was conducted, asking Moapa Valley folks what the local Rotary Club is and what it does, it would no doubt yield a variety of interesting answers.

A few people might recall that the Club provides, cooks up and serves a free pancake breakfast for the entire community at the Fairgrounds on every 4th of July.

Others might recall seeing the wagon-wheel shaped Rotary logo on our cook trailer parked at the north end of the Jeff Keel Stadium at every home football game where Rotarians are always grilling up hamburgers and hotdogs for the MVHS Boosters concession stand.

A few might remember seeing our float in the annual Veterans Day Parade. Right after the parade, they might also notice that same grease-splattered crew working at the same cook trailer, grilling more hamburgers for the community picnic at the Overton Park.

But the sad fact is, local folks probably wouldn’t know much more about Rotary than that. In fact, more likely than not, most people in town that you ask probably wouldn’t know anything at all about Rotary or its mission; either globally or locally.

Frankly, that is okay. We aren’t in it for the recognition. Locally, we prefer to work behind the scenes, The Rotary International motto is “Service Above Self.” And local Rotarians certainly recognize that our service is not about what the Club, or what we as its members, get out of it. We are just proud to be serving the community that we love.

But it is important to note that, though we are both pleased and honored to be the chuck wagon for many Moapa Valley events, there is much more to Rotary than our smoking cook trailer.

For example, last week I was privileged to award a total of $20,000 in Rotary scholarships to 10 of our local seniors; all bound for different hopeful futures. One day earlier this month, a small group of

Rotarians and I spent nearly 7 hours interviewing a multitude of young applicants in order to select which of them would receive these awards. We fell in love with every single one of these amazing local youth. They were all deserving and are headed for great things! Selecting only 10 among them was a difficult decision.

It wasn’t just this year. The local Rotary Club has been awarding similar scholarships to MVHS graduating seniors every year for decades.

You may ask: Where does the money come from to fund these scholarships? Well it certainly doesn’t come out of our members’ pockets. We are a very small club and our members are not particularly wealthy. Unlike other service clubs, we don’t pressure, shame or extort money from our members to accomplish our goals. That is not how we do it in the Moapa Valley Rotary Club.

Instead we work … and we work hard. This is not a laid-back social club that wears funny hats, while drinking alcohol and shooting pool. No, our membership stays knee-deep in community service throughout the year. Amid all of the free stuff we do just for the love of the community, we also conduct a number of fundraising efforts – just so that we can provide these scholarships to local youth.

That brings me to the central purpose of this column. In recent years, our membership has become ever shorter in numbers and ever longer in years. Because of this, our efforts to serve the community have begun to challenge our little club’s ability to continue doing them. To be frank, we are swiftly reaching a point where we may not be able to continue on some of them. We just are lacking the manpower to continue fulfilling many of the service roles that the community has come to take for granted over the years. That would be a shame!

So we are asking for help! As the saying goes, Many hands make light work. We just don’t have very many hands anymore to spread that work. We need more willing hands to continue the good work of the Moapa Valley Rotary Club.

We welcome new members to our organization. There are no mysteries, no secret handshakes and no solemn ceremonies necessary to join our club. All it takes is a person seeking “Service Above Self.” If you are seeking for that, your search is over. The Moapa Valley Rotary Club can help.

We invite anyone interested to come and check us out. We hope that you will consider joining us in continuing to serve this wonderful community. For more information email me at suzyb@mvdsl.com. We would be glad to have you aboard.