The club was treated to a different kind of guest today - our own Terry Cooper took the podium to present information on projects that the Projects and Planning Committee is involved in and to describe the process for obtaining funding from the committee. Terry keeps an update file of committee agendas, funding requests, general information including the committee's most recent Terms of Reference and application forms for funding on Clubrunner. All of this information can be found by clicking on "Organization" on the upper menu ribbon and then selecting "Documents". Our club works with other clubs to ensure that the most community benefit is achieved with the money available.

In order to request project funding, a funding application form must be completed and submitted. The form asks for a description of the project, benefits, costs and impacts.

 

Next, Terry described how the budget is set up. There are three primary siloes:

The Rotary Music Festival sits under this budget although it is administered separately. There is also funding pots for International Projects and Initiatives. The budget can be found in the "Documents" section of Clubrunner as described above.  Terry states that overall budget will be essentially balanced. Moving forward, will have enough money to do some things but will require moving some money within the committee’s budget.

Saamis Clothing Drive - unknown at this point what the cost will be - Rotary will handle promotion using social media and so forth while Y Treasures will collect the clothing donations and assist Saamis in distributing the clothing to their clients.

 

Dale Stein talked about Kiva - a crowd funded, microfinancing organization that connects people with lenders. The difference is that Kiva works in 70 countries on 5 continents to help entrepreneurs who would otherwise be unable to secure loans to start or grow their business.  Kiva has funded 2.3 million loans totaling $2 billion to date with over 96% repayment rate. For as little as $25 dollars, anyone can loan money. As your loan is repaid, you can re-invest that money into a loan for someone else. Please go to Kiva.org to learn more about this awesome opportunity to give people a hand up rather than a hand out! It is truly amazing!

Manali Shanbhag is working on a community health screening project. Initially the focus will be on women's health but will also eventually include men's health screening. She is looking to be operational next spring.

Alain Guerard talked about current projects to support Ukraine. He highlighted the large number of organizations involved in funding projects for Ukraine, which does make coordination of effort more challenging. Nonethless, Kitt Brand is currently working with one of the Calgary Rotary clubs to raise money for electrical gen sets for use by schools during bombardments when students are in shelters and the electrical grid is non functional.