President’s Message

Club President: David Morales 2024-2025

Message:  

Rotary International has been a successful service organization for 119 years.  With over 45,000 clubs worldwide and a membership of more than 1.2 million, Rotary members believe that we have a shared responsibility to act on our world’s most persistent issues by working together to:  promote peace, fight disease, provide clean water, sanitation, and hygiene, save mothers and children, support education, grow local economies and protect the environment.  As your 2024-2025 President, in our club’s 86th year, I am blessed to be serving a second consecutive year and still fully motivated to lead a club that is more like a family to me, filled with brother and sister Rotarians, who can carry out Rotary’s mission, while making a difference in our local community, neighboring cities and in other countries.  In my 22 years as a South Pasadena Rotarian, I have taking on different roles in the club to increase my knowledge of Rotary and have learned many leadership skills of our past Presidents.  Now, I have added a year of experience as President, which I can confidently say I’m best prepared to lead us again into another year of Service Above Self.

Pennsylvanian, Stephanie Urchick, is our Rotary International President for 2024-2025, making her only the second woman to have such title with our worldwide organization.  Her theme, THE MAGIC OF ROTARY, she says comes from a time she was helping install water filters in the Dominican Republic.  Two young boys watched as dirty water entered the filter in one end and emerged clean out the other end.  When they stopped the water flow one of the boys grabbed her sleeve and said, “Lady, lady, show me that magic again”. “Obviously, the water filter wasn’t magic”, Urchick said and added “We worked hard to transport those filters, install them, and work with community leaders in the area to maintain them.  But those boys knew that easy access to clean water would change their lives.  Knowing that I played a small part in that certainly changed my life.”  Here she saw the magic of Rotary on display.

Do You Believe in Magic?; You Can Do Magic; This Magic Moment.  These magical songs will take you on a Magic Carpet Ride to my own club theme for this year:  “Rock Band”.  In addition to a Justice League of America, I have also analogized our club to a Rock Band.  A rock band has multiple members that each brings their unique talent and skill that helps and contributes to an album or song.   For us, the album is our Club, and the songs are our Service Projects that have lasting effects to our community whether it’s a tangible structure such as the youth house in Garfield Park or an intangible memory like a scholarship, care package or meal preparation.  In my opinion, the most successful bands of all time are The Beatles, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and the Bee Gees.  These bands have one thing in common:  multiple lead singers, which avoids a mundane sound for generations of fans to enjoy.  Similarly, Rotary has multiple Presidents (or lead singers) with their own dreams and goals (or sounds) with an opportunity for their community to remember for years to come.  This is why Rotary has been so successful for over 100 years.

The “sounds” that I want our club to make this year are the following three aligned with my club theme:  collaborating with another local club(s), to provide a screening of the documentary film of musician Herb Alpert entitled, “Herb Albert Is” by director John Scheinfeld;  financial aid and hands-on participation with the South Pasadena Chamber of Commerce’s Eclectic Music Festival;  and bring back the Dan Stover Instrumental Music Competition to our club.  At the start of my second year, 85% of our club membership is signed up for Rotary Direct, which continues to prove that we have very generous members who donate, and we are one of a few clubs (~10%) in our District 5300 to have achieved both “100% Paul Harris Fellow Club” and “Every Rotarian, Every Year”.  Repeating from last year’s President’s message, we need to continue to place a strong effort on building our membership and our club’s major fundraiser, The Taste of South Pasadena.  As a member of this club, we need your participation in recruiting and cultivating new members so that the legacy of your service over the years, and the members before you and those we have lost, can be instilled, inspire, and live on forever in those future South Pasadena Rotarians.  Again, our Taste of South Pasadena fundraiser had raised the most money in all the ten years we have sponsored the event, yet, we have the potential to do, offer and raise more.  Every South Pasadena Rotarian should be involved in our major fundraiser that will generate the funds to allow our club to thrive in new service projects and long-term goals.  I challenge and encourage all club members to make time in your Rotary year to be engaged in these areas of your club’s future and while doing so, let’s provide an atmosphere for family, fun and fellowship, so we can make this another year to remember.

Yours in Rotary Service

David Morales