We are back having our next "In-Person" meeting at the Mercure Hotel, North Melbourne this week and it should be a really full meeting and hopefully it will be interesting to all attending.

The highlight will be the induction of 3 new members. Fatuma Ali, Abdullahi Osman and Ibrahim Abdi.

Fatuma and Abdullahi were both at our Rotary Information meeting 2 weeks ago and Ibrahim had our traditional Lunch meeting this week so they all know about Rotary and we have met them all and all is set for their induction so please be there to welcome them into Rotary.

Last week we had the Board meeting we had good discussions about our club direction and a few things that came out of the meeting supported for a few organizations that have recently provided speakers to the club.

We have now donated $250.00 to the Seven Women organization after being spoken to by Stephanie Woollard about the great work they are doing for women in Nepal.

As well if you have been following these newsletters you should have seen last week that I wrote about our member's Herbson Singo's efforts to raise money for starving families in Malawi. well at the board meeting the members decided to add another $250.00 to the fund on top of the donations already made by some of our members.

We were also very impressed with the work Ames Australia is doing with the Aghan refugees that have arrived in Melbourne after fleeing the Taliban and are being looked after in the North Melbourne area.

As well we were also very impressed with the River Nile School and the work they are doing with providing an education to young ladies that have come to Australia as refugees.

The club has invited both of the last 2 groups to attend our club's Christmas meeting on 16th December 2021 at the Mercure Hotel and they will each have a table of 8 as our guests. We look forward to welcoming these communities into the family of Rotary and hope it will be the start of an ongoing relationship.

This is bound to be a really fun meeting with a special guest, media personality, Shawn Cosgrove. Shawn is also a friend of our Past President, Fr. Joe Giacobbe who has marked the date down to attend.

As part of the relationship we are developing with Ames Australia we have agreed to carry out a BBQ lunch at a venue to be determined on Friday 10th December 2021.

We are required to provide Halal sausages and veggie burgers and cold drinks to 400 people who are staff and clients of Ames Australia who will handle the Covid compliance and the location selection and we will do everything else. We will be paid a very fair amount for our work so it will be a good fund-raiser. Being a workday getting volunteers is not easy so if you are able to help or have a family member that can help please contact me. page@ghp.biz

So what else is on tomorrow:

Ted Dziadkiweicz will explain to us about NAC - North Melbourne Agency Collective. This is a new concept for most of us but seems to be an alliance of the local North Melbourne agencies and of course, we consider our Rotary Club is certainly a part of this group.

Lastly, when our member, Herbson Singo did his "Member Behind the Badge" talk earlier this year he mentioned that he had the vision to build a Wellness Centre in Malawi. Well since that meeting he emailed me a quite a detailed brief of what he wanted so I prepared a rough concept and passed it onto Kammy Leung to draw it up properly and so we now have something we can look at.

So Herbson has said he is quite passionate about this project and so is quite keen to let our members know more about it.

Last week I gave you a sneak preview of his story that is likely to feature in the North West Melbourne News early next year so here is a sneak preview of the Wellness Centre development

RIMERN   (Rotary Inner Melbourne Emergency Relief Network)

Well after going for a few months now they finally had a hiccup on the weekend and Murphy's Law is that it was our club that was affected.

The reality was it was our turn to do a shift last Saturday afternoon and our trusty volunteers all showed up so thank you to Larry, Ted, Herbson, Colleen, and first-timer Neil Bateman. The problem was the organizers did not have their manager there to open up so unfortunately, our team had to go home without striking a blow.

It was a real shame and apologies to those that took the time out of their day for no effective purpose. We can assure you this is being seriously addressed with the organizers and we will have something worked out shortly and I will report on it further in next week's newsletter.

In the meantime, if anyone else is interested to get on our roster then please contact Judy Page on 0425 741 624 or email on judypage3@gmail.com. You do have to be double vaccinated