DISCURSOS - Rotary International

helping your clubs through that transition is part of your job. With the help of your district Rotary
Foundation chair, you will help your clubs understand Future Vision, benefit from the changes, and
do the most they can with their resources to effect positive change in our world.
In my home state of Oklahoma, if you meet someone who’s a big talker, you might tell him to
put his money where his mouth is. Well, I’m a big talker about our Rotary Foundation, and I put
my money where my mouth is — because I believe that the Foundation should be the charity of
choice for every Rotarian, and even more so for every Rotary officer. If you’re going to ask other
people to donate, you need to be donating yourself. It’s called “leading by example.” And that’s
why, before this assembly, I asked every one of you to make a donation in your own name to The
Rotary Foundation. I’m proud to announce that every one of you did — as well as every RI Board
member and every Foundation Trustee. Together, we raised US$675,000.
Now, I have to believe that some of this is money that The Rotary Foundation probably would not
have received had I not asked. And I think that this is an important lesson for each of us here today:
if you want somebody else to do something, you can just sit around and wait for them to get
the idea, or you can ask. Doesn’t it make a lot more sense to just ask?
When I was in high school, I was a very active member of the Key Club. You probably all know
that Key Club is not a youth program of Rotary International. It’s a youth program of a different
service organization: Kiwanis International. And I always assumed back then that, one day, I’d be
a Kiwanian.
But do you know why I’m standing up here as president-elect of Rotary International, and not
president-elect of Kiwanis International, training their incoming officers?
Because no one ever invited me to a Kiwanis Club and no one ever asked me to join Kiwanis. I
did, however, get invited to, and asked to join, the Rotary Club of Norman, Oklahoma. I’m here
today because someone asked me.
You have to ask. You — not the person sitting next to you or the person in charge of the membership
committee or someone else who you might think would be better at it or who maybe has
more time. Membership is not someone else’s job — it’s my job, it’s your job, it’s every Rotarian’s
opportunity.
You have to ask. You need to find those people who are waiting to be asked, find the people who
never thought about Rotary, and let them know that you’d like to have them in your club. And if
you do a good job and they say yes, and they become members — your job isn’t over. It’s only
just beginning, because you need to mentor them, make sure that they find a meaningful role in
the club — and that they get satisfaction out of Rotary.
If we kept every new member who joined Rotary, we wouldn’t need to talk about membership
anymore. We get plenty of new members in Rotary every year — about 120,000. But every year,
just about that many members leave. And that’s why our numbers have stayed the same, at
about 1.2 million members, for more than 15 years.
It’s time to do something about it — not just talk about it but actually do something about it. The
first thing we need to do is take a look at those who are leaving and find out why they’re leaving
and what, if anything, we can do about it. We are committed to seeing Rotary membership
climb to 1.3 million by 2015. That’s an absolutely achievable goal — but we need to determine
why so many who come in the front door go right out the back door. In 1987 Rotary was given
the opportunity to extend membership to women. It was, indeed, a red-letter day for Rotary. But
if you look around you, it quickly becomes very obvious that there should be a lot more women in
this room today than there are. There is no reason that half of the incoming governors shouldn’t
be women. That’s something we all need to work on. Additionally, we need to work on bringing
2 International Assembly Speeches 2013