Interact Advisors’ Update - October 2017
Hello, Interact Advisors:
I wanted to remind you, first of all, that the Fall Leadership Conference Early Bird Discount ($20 perperson, versus $25) deadline is this Sunday, October 15th. The deadline for full fee conference registrations for your Interact club members and for Advisors is October 28th. You can easily register on-line via our Interact district website, www.rotaryazinteract.org. Payments are to be made payable to Interact District 5495, and should be mailed to our Interact Registrar, Kathy Rossetti, 21405 West Brittle Bush Lane, Buckeye, AZ 88396. If your school requires an invoice, in order to get a check sent to pay for your club’s registrations, please let me know. We will be happy to produce one and email it to you. Fall Leadership Conference this year is being hosted by that great Interact Club at Barry Goldwater High School on Saturday, November 4th. The school’s address is 2820 W. Rose Lane, Phoenix, AZ 85027. We are hoping to see you and a representative group of your club leaders there! Come and hear the thrilling stories from the 4 Interactors you helped send to Kenya this past summer, as they tell how they used the mobility devices your clubs collected to totally change lives.
Cluster Club Training Days are underway! Have you heard from your Interact Assistant Governor yet about the date your group of clubs is scheduled to meet? I can tell you that the clubs who participate in these really do find them to be very beneficial to their clubs. It is a day of sharing and brainstorming together — and it costs you nothing. One of the sponsoring Rotary clubs picks up the tab for the lunch, and there is no registration fee. All you have to do is let your AG know how many of you are coming, and then show up. Free is good!!
Interact Crutches 4 Africa Project — How is your club doing this year in collecting those crutches, canes, walkers, wheelchairs and other devices that we can wrap at our Interact District Conference, and then ship to Kenya, for our next team of Interactors to help distribute to those who need them so badly? Do you need a customized flyer like the one attached that Mohave High Interact is using? I will be happy to adapt it to insert your club’s and drop-off location(s). Please do not leave this to be a last- minute, short-term project, right before the District Conference. If you do, you will miss so many opportunities when these devices become available, and you will wind up collecting much less that you would if your club was working on it all year, with one of more special pushes. Among other ideas, check with your assisted living and nursing facilities in your community, and let them know your club is collecting these devices to help meet needs in Kenya — and that your club is willing to come and pick up any mobility devices they may have from prior patients, or that they have been given.
Applications are now being accepted from candidates for the next five AZ Interact Ambassadors we will be sending to Kenya, June 29 - July 15, 2018. Applicants must be an active member of an Interact club anywhere in Arizona, or in Needles, CA, or Laughlin, NV. The program information and the application form are available on our Interact district website, www.rotaryazinteract.org. What an incredible international opportunity to serve this will be for the five who will be selected. The application deadline is December 15. We will be introducing next summer’s AZ Interact Ambassadors team at our Interact District Conference on February 24.
RYLA Delegates Application Deadline is Oct. 31 for our RYLA being held over the Martin Luther King Holiday weekend at Camp Pinerock in Prescott, January 12-15, 2018. On-line applications are being accepted at www.ryla5495pinerock.org. Scholarships to attend this incredible, life-changing weekend are available from sponsoring Rotary clubs. We encourage Interact clubs to take advantage of these scholarships.
Interviews for Rotary Youth Exchange applicants are scheduled for November 11. Applications for this premier foreign exchange program are accepted on-line at www.rotary5495youth.com. Every year Rotary sponsors over 8,000 high school youth who spend an academic year in one of more than 80 countries. It is one of the safest and most affordable programs available. Challenge some of your Interactors to consider studying in another country for a year, or for possibly home hosting an inbound Rotary Youth Exchange student for 3 or 4 months.
Our Annual Hunger Games Canned Food Drive is a challenge to all Interact clubs to plan your own
drive to gather canned and packaged foods for the benefit of one of your local food banks. Your drive can be on campus or in the community — or both. It can be held at any time during the year. But please take a photo of your group with your collected pile of food, and sent that photo, along with the number of items you collected, to us — so we can announce some totals at our Interact District Conference on Feb. 24 at Perry High School in Gilbert.
Video Contests are an opportunity for your club to show the rest of the Rotary world the amazing
amount of service your club renders to your school, your community, and to other parts of the world. These 3-minute videos are not that difficult to produce, and then upload to YouTube. You club can have great fun producing your club video. The District Video Contest theme this year is “Rotary Making A Difference.” Simply creatively show how your club, as part of Rotary, is helping to make a difference in people’s lives. The deadline to send to us the link to your club’s video is February 1, 2018. The top three videos are shown at our Interact District Conference, and the winning club takes home the traveling placque to keep and display for the next year. Here’s the link for details about Rotary’s international video contest, which has a deadline of Nov. 30, and a prize of $1,000: https://my.rotary.org/en/2017-interact- video-awards- offers-chance- receive-1000
The new Interact Guide has recently replaced the old Interact Handbook. In case you have not see a
copy of this new publication, I have attached it to this edition of Advisor’s Update. I suggest you save it in your files for future reference.
A number of other resources for Interact clubs and Club Advisors can be found on our Interact District website, www.rotaryazinteract.org. Please let us know if you need anything you can’t find there. As always, we are here to help support you and your club. Give me a call, or send me an email if you have any questions.
-- Art