President's Message - July 2022
July 2022
Dear Rotarians
It’s hard to believe that it was one year ago that I wrote my first Presidents message to you on succeeding Brian Anderson as President of the Rotary Club of Royal Hua Hin, with a feeling of trepidation stepping into the shoes of some great past presidents of our club.
However, with the support of our club officers and of course the members the year has been productive in terms of what we have achieved.
In the last 12 months we have seen members return to Thailand following a long absence through the restrictions of Covid-19, and with their return improved attendances at both our meetings and our projects.
In October we saw the restrictions on how we could run our club lifted, and once again we started face to face weekly meetings and fellowship evenings which was well received.
For those of you that have followed our activities on both the club runner website and our face book page we have been very active, we completed 16 projects spending over 900,000 Thai Baht on mainly local projects, but also joint projects with Rotary Club of Hua Hin, Rotary Club of Bangkok South, Rotary Club of Noble Park-Dingley and Rotary Club of Cheltenham in Australia.
This Rotary year we have seen the completion of the Rotary Education Center, and from May the classroom has been used teaching English to students at the school using the technology our club provided. Further plans are in place to use the facility to help the local community.
The ‘Thai Voices” project is also moving forward as a national project with 18 Panyanukul Schools now taking part.
My one concern for my Presidential year with the cancellation of our golf tournament was that would we have sufficient funds to undertake these projects, fortunately we had some excellent support from Dr Michael Gubser of the Help4People Foundation and the Bangkok Nursing Home Association who between them donated 1.1 million baht. This was instrumental in helping us achieve the above projects.
I look forward to the new relationship with E-Jan an online Thai media company and the new school project near Black Mountain where our club and the Rotary Club of Bangkok South have so far pledged 600,000 Thai Baht towards the building of a specialist Audio/Sensory room which will cost 1 million Baht. Planning will also start for the return of our Annual Amateur Golf Classic in November this year.
Our club has a short but vibrant history, with a reputation of being a big club with a big heart, and this was only made possible by our Past Presidents. However, as an English-speaking club, I felt we were isolated from the 98 Thai Clubs. After the early frustrations of communication problems within Rotary District 3330, I made a commitment to integrate both myself and our club into our District activities and one of the highlights for me has been taking part in Rotary Year 117 activities with the other Presidents.
Hopefully this has set a precedence of our club’s visibility in the District for Rotary year 118. In addition, as a club we had the highest number of attendances from our members at both the District Training Assembly in Cha-Am and the District Conference in Phuket.
My next goal is to make our club more robust in terms stability, once again we have struggled to find a President Elect, fortunately Dr Helmut Schepers has stepped into this role, however we need to attract our members and new members into both our committees, and club officers enabling a sustainability for future club Presidents, therefore making us a healthy club. Let us not forget this is your Rotary Club, and without your participation our club would not be able to undertake the work of supporting our community.
I would like to thank the club officers and members of the Rotary Club of Royal Hua Hin for your support over the last year, and look forward to you continued support for this Rotary year.
I must also mention that without the support of my wife Mai, PP Napa and Rotarian Benjamas the interaction with the other Thai clubs would not have been possible.
I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our Installation Dinner of the 23rd July.
Happy New Rotary Year.
Phil Lawrence.
President of the Rotary Club of Royal Hua Hin.
