Purpose

This is a story about purpose. Or more to the point, it is about understanding and questioning our purpose. It is about the difference between activity and purpose, between tradition and relevance, between working hard and working on the right things. Rotary clubs can have a proud history, good people and noble intentions, yet still no longer be fit for the purpose they were created to serve.

The phrase “fit for purpose” is simple enough. In the world of products and services, something is fit for purpose when it does the job it is meant to do. It doesn't have to be perfect, expensive, sophisticated or traditional. It simply has to be suitable for the need it is intended to meet.

A small car may be perfectly fit for purpose for city commuting, but not for towing a heavy trailer. A pair of shoes may be ideal for walking around town, but completely unsuitable for climbing a mountain. That is the heart of the concept. Fit for purpose is not measured by history, sentiment, effort, pride or good intentions. It is measured by suitability. Does it meet the need? Does it work for the people it is meant to serve? Does it remain effective as conditions change?

That last question is where the concept becomes more challenging. Something can be fit for purpose at one point in time and gradually become less suitable as the world changes around it. Customer expectations change. Technology changes. Costs change. Communities change. Lifestyles change. Volunteer expectations change. What once worked well can become inconvenient, unattractive or irrelevant if it is never reviewed. There was a time when every home had a landline, every car had a street directory, and every camera needed a roll of film. There was nothing wrong with those things, but the world found a better way and moved on - and a device that could replace all of them.

Successful organisations do not simply ask whether they are still doing what they have always done. They ask whether what they are doing still fulfils the purpose they were created to achieve. That question is not an attack on tradition. It is a test of relevance. And Rotary is not exempt from that test.

A Rotary club exists to bring people together in service. It should create friendship, purpose, leadership, community impact and connection. Meetings, traditions, committees, meals, procedures and fundraising events can all support that purpose, but none of them are the purpose itself.

That distinction matters because many clubs still measure their health by whether they can continue the familiar routines of club life. Can we still hold the weekly meeting? Can we still run the same fundraiser? Can we still fill the board positions? Can we still find enough people to do what we did last year? Those questions are understandable, but they are not enough.

The better question is whether those routines still help the club achieve its purpose. Do they make Rotary easier to join, easier to stay in, easier to promote and easier to partner with? Do they help the club serve its community in meaningful ways? Do they give members a reason to feel excited, useful and connected? If the answer is no, then the club may be busy, loyal and well-intentioned, but it may no longer be fit for purpose.

I often recount the story of the sad demise of the Rotary Club of Lameroo in my home state of South Australia. Lameroo is a small town in the Murray Mallee, around 210 kilometres east of Adelaide, with a population of approximately 850 people. Its Rotary club had a long and proud history, but handed in its charter in 2014. For as long as I could remember, the club had single-digit membership, none of whom were under 70. I was a member of our district leadership team at the time its impending closure was announced, and we so-called “experts” trotted out every excuse you could imagine. Lameroo was small and isolated. The region had been affected by drought and other economic pressures. Young people were leaving for education and employment opportunities. It was easy to accept that the closure was simply a sad but unavoidable consequence of external circumstances. In other words, the community could no longer sustain a Rotary club.

But less than six months after that Rotary club closed, Lions International launched a new club in the town with 35 members.

That changes the story completely. If another service club could establish itself in the same town, under the same regional economic conditions, then the issue was not simply that Lameroo could no longer support a service club. The community still had capacity for service. It still had people willing to join, contribute and belong. What it apparently could not support was the version of Rotary being offered at the time.

That is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the Fit for Purpose concept. External factors may well have contributed to the closure. Regional decline, drought, isolation and demographic change are real pressures, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But the Lameroo story shows the danger of treating those pressures as the whole explanation. They can become the mother of all assumptions, allowing us to avoid the harder and more important question: What if the problem was not the community, but the product on offer?

What version of a service club was Rotary asking people to join? Was it flexible enough, visible enough, affordable enough and relevant enough? Was it connected to the interests, expectations and availability of the people who still wanted to serve their town? Or had the club become a version of Rotary that only made sense to those already inside it?

We also need to be honest about the elephant in the room. No matter how dedicated, generous and friendly a small group of septuagenarians may be, their capacity to attract and engage the next generation of volunteers will be limited if the club experience largely reflects the interests, habits and expectations of that age group. Across our zone, the average age of a Rotarian is over 72. In the latest figures, 32.86% of our membership base is recorded as being aged 70 and over, while another 34.69% have no age recorded at all. I strongly suspect many of those unreported ages would also sit in the older age brackets. So, the challenge before us is not simply the occasional ageing club. It is the proliferation of ageing clubs across the zone, each increasingly shaped by a generational profile that makes renewal harder.

I’m not about to criticise the senior Rotarians among our ranks. They have carried Rotary for decades and continue to contribute enormously. But I can and will criticise the mindset that has allowed us to reach this point without confronting what it means. If a club’s culture, meeting format, projects, language, social rhythms and expectations are built almost entirely around the preferences of older existing members, we should not be surprised when younger prospective members struggle to see themselves as a part of it. That does not mean the community lacks volunteers. It may simply mean the version of Rotary being offered is no longer fit for purpose.

Across Rotary South Pacific, we have lost well over 120 clubs in the past three years, and there are many more hanging by a thread right now. We may lose as many as ten more clubs in the next week. Every closure has its own local story, and every club deserves to have that story treated with respect. But I am willing to bet that very few, if any, handed in their charter because their local community could no longer sustain a service club. More likely, their communities could no longer sustain the version of Rotary those clubs were offering.

That has consequences beyond the loss of a single club. Every closure chips away at Rotary’s visibility, reduces our reach, weakens confidence in our future and sends a message, fairly or unfairly, that Rotary is retreating from communities where it was once a trusted presence. When a club closes, the effect is not contained within the club. The wider Rotary brand is affected. Other clubs nearby feel it. District leaders feel it. Community partners notice it. Prospective members see it. Existing members begin to wonder whether decline is inevitable.

As clubs close and membership numbers fall, districts themselves become harder to sustain. Redistricting is never popular. No-one enjoys seeing districts absorbed, bifurcated, merged or reconfigured. It disrupts relationships, identity, history and familiar ways of working. But as the number of clubs and members in each district declines, some form of consolidation becomes inevitable. The result is often a larger geographic territory with fewer clubs spread across it, making support, connection and leadership even harder to maintain. In that sense, club failure does not only weaken local Rotary presence; it also places pressure on the very structures designed to support clubs in the first place.

In early 2024 I was collecting some goods from a local salvage yard when I saw a sign that stopped me in my tracks. I was in the early stages of workshopping the initiative that would later become known as the Fit for Purpose program, but at that time it did not have a name. Until I saw that sign. But importantly, Fit for Purpose is not just the name of a program or a club improvement slogan. It is a survival question.

When Rotary talks about membership decline, we often focus on the one or two members who leave a club during the year. We worry about the member who resigns because they are too busy, moves away, loses interest, becomes unwell or quietly drifts from active involvement.  Or dies. Those losses matter, because every member matters, but they are not the full picture.

The more damaging membership loss occurs when clubs close and take 10 or 15 members with them at a time. Our records suggest very few of those members choose to continue their Rotary journey in another club. That is the real membership crisis. Multiply that by more than 120 clubs and it is not hard to see where much of our membership has gone.

When a club hands in its charter, Rotary does not simply lose a meeting venue or a line on a district report. It loses a local identity, community relationships, project knowledge, history, goodwill, partnerships and visibility. It loses the people who were still willing to call themselves Rotarians right up until the point their club no longer existed. Some may have been tired. Some may have been ageing. Some may have been ready to step back. But many were still connected to Rotary through the club they knew. When that club disappears, their Rotary journey usually ends with it.

This is why club failure must be understood as a prominent cause of membership decline. We say Rotary is needed more than ever. We say people want connection and purpose. We say communities need service and leadership. All of that is true. But if clubs continue to close, the public evidence begins to point in the other direction.

That is why the Fit for Purpose program mattered. It was not designed simply as a recruitment campaign, nor was it about finding a clever slogan or a new way to ask people to join. It was about helping clubs look honestly at the product they were offering: the Rotary experience itself.

For years, membership conversations in Rotary have focused heavily on recruitment and retention. How do we bring people in? How do we stop people leaving? Those questions are important, but they are downstream questions. Recruitment and retention are outcomes. They are influenced by something more fundamental: the attractiveness and perceived value of the Rotary experience, and how effectively that experience is promoted to the wider community.

In simple terms, membership is shaped by product and promotion. If the product is weak, recruitment becomes difficult and retention becomes fragile. If the product is strong but poorly promoted, the community may never understand what Rotary has to offer. If both product and promotion are strong, recruitment and retention become much easier. For years I heard senior Rotarians say, “If everyone introduced one member to Rotary, membership would double.” I have a visceral reaction to that over simplified narrative, because it suggests we only have a promotion problem, not a product problem.

Clubs must ask difficult questions about themselves. Are we meeting-centric or service-centric? Are we rigid or flexible? Are we formal or welcoming? Are we exclusive or inclusive? Do we measure commitment by attendance or engagement? Do we communicate our story openly, or do we remain almost invisible to the community? Do we create meaningful opportunities for newer members to shape the club, or do we expect them to simply fit into what already exists? Do we listen to the community, or do we keep running the same projects because they are familiar?

These questions go directly to whether a club is fit for purpose. A club that is fit for purpose does not abandon its history, but it refuses to be trapped by it. It understands that meetings should support service, not become the main purpose of the organisation. It recognises that time, cost and format matter. It reduces friction. It gives members ownership. It listens to its community. It invests in visibility. It builds partnerships. It understands that relevance is not something achieved once and kept forever. It must be continually earned.

Having spent so many years analysing Rotary’s purpose, I have recently found myself considering my own. A passion for membership development through club improvement has shaped much of the last decade of my Rotary life.

Ten years ago whilst serving as District 9520 Membership Chair, I helped get the Rotary Club of Seaford off the ground. That experience mattered deeply because it proved something I had believed for a long time: Rotary could still attract contemporary volunteers if we were prepared to offer them a more contemporary version of Rotary. Seaford Rotary was not built around the assumption that people needed to adapt themselves to Rotary. It was built around the idea that Rotary needed to present a more flexible, service-focused and relevant experience to people who still wanted connection, purpose and community impact, but who were unlikely to be attracted to the traditional aspects of club life. That club became, in many ways, my proof of concept. I can distinctly remember at the time concerns raised in neighbouring clubs that the new Seaford club would steal their prospective members. If the product on offer at those clubs was sufficiently attractive, they would have had nothing to fear.

Then came Creatures of Habit. Writing that book helped me put into words the frustrations and observations I had accumulated over years of watching Rotary struggle with change. It also changed the direction of my Rotary journey. Suddenly, I was being invited to speak at membership seminars, district conferences and training events across Australia and New Zealand. The more I travelled, the clearer the message became: Rotary’s problem was not that people no longer wanted to serve. Rotary’s problem was that too many clubs were offering a version of service club life that no longer matched the expectations of the people they hoped to attract.

Over time, my own purpose in Rotary became clearer. I was not simply interested in membership numbers. I was interested in helping Rotary become more attractive, more flexible, more relevant and more honest about the experience it was offering. That purpose eventually led me to the Rotary South Pacific Membership Portfolio Team, where I took on the role of Chair of Club and Cultural Transformation. In many ways, it felt like the opportunity I had been preparing for over many years. It should have been energising, and at times, it was. There were wonderful people involved. There were brilliant ideas. There were clubs that embraced the challenge and proved meaningful transformation was possible. 

I can distinctly remember two conversations at a breakfast event for our zone in Calgary during last year’s international convention. Both were with members from clubs participating in the Fit for Purpose program. The first was with a member who felt extremely privileged for his club to be involved. He rattled off a list of improvements the club had implemented and was full of enthusiasm and praise. I was on a real high. But that bubble was quickly burst by a second conversation with a Rotarian who lamented that her club had failed to implement any of its Club Fitness Plan and had continued its trajectory of decline.

That contrast sums up much of the experience. There were clubs that grabbed the opportunity and clubs that retreated to the comfort zone. There were moments of encouragement, but there was also exhaustion. In this senior zone role, I constantly fought systemic barriers, competing agendas, unnecessary interference and the frustration of trying to deliver membership strategy in an environment that did not always seem prepared to let membership people get on with membership work. I expected the fight against comfort-zone thinking, but I was not ready for the fight against egos. The dominant narrative throughout this pilot was that membership was the number one priority. But in my experience, the walk rarely matched the talk. 

For a long time, I pushed through that frustration because the work mattered to me. I had spent years saying Rotary’s membership decline was not due to a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will. So, I kept trying to bring knowledge, structure, resources and urgency to the problem. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Only recently have I properly understood it.

For years, Rotary membership development was not just something I did. It gave me purpose. I would have described it as passion, commitment, frustration, ambition or a desire to help Rotary become what I believed it could be. All of that was true, but beneath it sat something more personal. I can see now that Rotary had been filling a purpose void in my life, one my working life had never been able to satisfy.

For a number of years, I ran a small business that struggled. I lost a lot of money, and with it, a lot of self-esteem. Then I took a job that paid the bills, but did little more than that. It provided income, but not much fulfilment. It did not fill my cup. It did not give me much sense of progress, influence, creativity or purpose. But Rotary did. Rotary gave me a platform, a problem worth solving, and a sense that my ideas mattered.

In mid-2024, I found myself in an untenable position at that workplace after a new owner took over the business. There was a disturbing lack of integrity on display that I could not turn a blind eye to. I lasted a week and walked out without the safety net of another job to go to. At the time, it felt risky, uncertain and deeply uncomfortable. The job had been providing security, but not fulfilment. I tolerated it, but rarely enjoyed it. Security can keep you in place long after you know something is no longer good for you. It can make the familiar feel safer than it really is, and the unfamiliar feel more dangerous than it may turn out to be.

I was unemployed for the first two months of the pilot, but eventually landed what has become the best job I have ever had. For the first time in decades, my paid work began giving me a genuine sense of purpose. I felt valued, useful, challenged and trusted. I had better people around me, better opportunities ahead of me, better pay, more flexibility, and a future I could actually see myself growing into. Looking back, walking away from that previous job was one of the smartest decisions I have ever made. I would not be where I am today professionally had I not first made the difficult decision to leave something familiar but no longer fulfilling.

There is a lesson for Rotary in that. Clubs often cling to familiar ways of operating because familiarity feels safe. The weekly meeting, the same fundraiser, the same structure, the same roles, the same language and the same expectations can all feel like stability. But if those familiar patterns are no longer producing relevance, energy, membership or community connection, they may be providing comfort rather than purpose. Sometimes becoming fit for purpose requires a club to take its own leap of faith: to leave the comfort zone, choose the unfamiliar over the familiar, and trust that a better version of Rotary may be waiting on the other side of courage.

I failed to recognise it at the time, but my purpose was evolving. That realisation has helped me understand my changing relationship with Rotary, especially beyond the club level. For many years, Rotary was the place where I went to feel that my ideas, energy and effort could make a difference. When my working life did not provide enough fulfilment, Rotary became the outlet. I poured myself into club building, writing, speaking, strategy and transformation because that work gave me meaning. But as my working life has begun to fill that space, the cost of Rotary frustration has become harder to justify.

The unnecessary battles felt heavier. The obstruction felt more pointless. The resistance felt more draining. The politics felt less tolerable. Not because Rotary mattered less, but because I no longer needed Rotary to meet the same personal need. That is an important distinction.

I still believe in Rotary. I still believe in the need for cultural transformation. I still believe clubs must become more flexible, relevant, inclusive, visible and service-centred if they want to survive. I still believe the Fit for Purpose message matters. But I no longer feel the same need to keep pouring myself into systems that seem determined to resist the very change they claim to want. That is not bitterness. It is clarity.

Purpose is powerful, but it can also be consuming. When a person finds purpose in a cause, they will tolerate frustration, absorb disappointment and keep going long after logic tells them to stop. For years, that was me. Rotary membership development gave me a reason to keep pushing. Now, with more purpose in my working life, I can see the Rotary journey with a little more distance. Perhaps that distance is healthy, because it allows me to ask the same question of myself that I have been asking Rotary clubs to ask of themselves: what is my purpose now?

For a club, being fit for purpose means understanding what it exists to do and shaping its culture, structure and activity around that purpose. Is personal purpose much different? If my purpose in Rotary was once to throw myself into membership development because that was where I found meaning, then I need to be honest enough to recognise when that purpose has shifted. I can still contribute. I can still share what I have learned and support clubs and leaders who genuinely want to change. But I do not need to keep fighting every battle, swimming against every rip, or proving that I care by exhausting myself.

Perhaps that is the personal lesson sitting beneath the organisational one: purpose should guide where we place our energy, not simply demand that we keep giving more of it. That same lesson applies to Rotary clubs. A club needs to understand its purpose before it can become fit for purpose. If it has clarity about what it exists to do, it can shape its meetings, culture, projects and member experience around that purpose. Rotarians need to understand their purpose too, because when purpose is clear, we know what deserves our effort, what we should keep carrying, and what we may finally need to put down.

Fit for Purpose is not just about whether Rotary clubs can survive. It is about whether they are still organised around the purpose they were created to serve. It is about whether they are willing to change the way they operate so their purpose can remain alive in a changing world. The same is true for people. We need purpose. We seek it in work, family, community, service and causes larger than ourselves. But purpose must be honest. It must be life-giving, not life-draining. It must help us become more useful, not simply more exhausted.

For Rotary, the challenge is clear. We cannot keep asking communities to support a product that no longer fits their lives. We cannot keep treating membership decline as a recruitment problem when so much of it is a relevance problem. We need clubs that understand their purpose. We need clubs that are fit for purpose. And we need Rotarians who are willing to ask, honestly and courageously, whether the way we are operating still serves the people, communities and future we claim to care about.

My senior zone leadership role concludes on June 30. It's time to hear different voices and perhaps go in different directions. My own Rotary Club of Seaford needs me, and that is where my Rotary energy needs to go. I will never say never. I do not know what Rotary holds for me in the future. I am grateful for an international network of friends I would never have met had I not been willing to throw myself into Rotary beyond club level. 

I hope I've made a difference, but right now, I need to step back.

 

Cultural Transformation

It’s been close to two years since I produced my last blog about Rotary’s membership challenges. In mid 2022 I used a blog to call on Rotarians in Zone 8 to take a leap of faith and vote “YES” to our regionalisation pilot. I was part of a team of presenters that visited clubs in my own District (9510) as part of a zone wide effort to outline the benefits of the pilot. In all honesty, I thought the chances of getting the pilot up were 50/50 at best. Apathy has always been a retarding force in membership development, and I expected it would play a role in the outcome of the vote. But in the end, the vote wasn’t even close. A staggering 89% of clubs across the zone voted in the affirmative. That’s not a landslide, but an avalanche. This despite a campaign that was unavoidably lacking in detail and promoting a somewhat nebulous concept. My take on the result was that clubs were saying “anything but the current way”.

The presentation made implicit claims about improving membership outcomes, such as “enabling us to grow”, and I speculate the pilot’s success will be judged more by membership outcomes than anything else. And that’s not an unreasonable expectation. After all, why would we go to all this bother to reconfigure administrative structures across the zone if we weren’t hopeful of growth? The simple fact is we are currently haemorrhaging members, and any transfusion will be futile unless we first find a way to cauterise the wounds. What we need is Cultural Transformation, which is a gargantuan task.

These days I start my membership presentations with the following quote: “Our inability to reverse our membership decline is due not to a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will.” It’s really critical that people grasp the notion that the primary issue holding us back is resistance to change and an unwillingness to step out of the comfort zone, not an inability to find solutions. But I’m convinced that resistance is not coming from the majority. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise given the Regionalisation Pilot vote. It has been my experience that those clubs which are struggling to modernise have met with resistance not from the majority of their members, but a minority (sometimes only one) who hold disproportionate influence. I often refer to this group as the Guardians of the Status Quo. To put it another way, the biggest challenge facing those Rotarians who hold genuine concerns about their club’s trajectory is not in finding solutions, but in finding ways to implement them.

So what exactly is Cultural Transformation? The simplest definition Google found me was this one: 

Cultural transformation is a process of changing the values, norms, and beliefs that shape an organisation's behaviour and decision-making.

I suggested earlier that we have a gargantuan transformative task ahead of us, but Rotary has actually been undergoing cultural transformation for as long as I can remember, albeit at a somewhat glacial pace. I have identified eight key areas to investigate, and will provide some commentary and a star rating out of five to express where I feel we currently find ourselves in Zone 8 on those transformational journeys. One star means we have barely begun and 5 stars means the transformation process is complete. Nothing gets 5 stars! I appreciate this is very subjective, and I’m trying my best to give an overall picture based on my interactions across the zone, but I’m well aware that many individual clubs will not align with my ratings.

Our Transformation from a Male Culture to a Uni-sex Culture - ★★★½

For the first 84 years of our history we were a male only organisation. I wasn’t a Rotarian when the rules were changed in 1989, but I was a Rotaractor with a close connection to a sponsoring Rotary club, and was able to watch that club’s reaction at an arm’s length. Like many clubs, it took a number of voting attempts before finally accepting women into the club, and a few members left as a result. We’re now 35 years downstream from that decision, and there is no doubt in my mind that the inclusion of women has facilitated the greatest cultural transformation that Rotary has ever seen, or will ever likely see. Gender parity is still a way off I suspect, for two reasons; firstly, the men did have an 84 year head start. Secondly, sadly, there are still clubs which either don’t accept or don’t welcome female members. There are regions of the world where this is due to cultural reasons. I’m not one who accepts that as an excuse.

Females currently account for 31% of our membership base across the zone, and for the last 15 years or so, 50% of our inductees have been female. The emergence of newer, more flexible and family friendly clubs has most certainly proven more attractive to females. My own club, the Rotary Club of Seaford, which chartered in 2016 has remained two thirds female. We’ve made amazing inroads, and no-one can credibly suggest that Rotary is not better off since females joined our ranks. But until females feel welcome, appreciated and comfortable in every club, we still have work to do.

... from an Exclusive Culture to an Inclusive Culture - ★★★★

My first memories of Rotary from the perspective of a Rotaractor were of a very exclusive organisation. That remains the case in many culturally dissimilar and less egalitarian countries. The exclusivity I remember was drawn predominantly across socio-economic and career seniority lines. I would suggest that 35 years later, Rotary in our part of the world is far more inclusive when viewed through those lenses, but our cultural transformation towards inclusivity is far from complete. Are we equally inclusive along the lines of race, religion, sexual identity and orientation, ability and ideology? Maybe not. 

... from a Covert Culture to an Overt Culture - ★★½

I’d stop short of suggesting that Rotary ever deliberately set out to be secretive, but for many years our light remained hidden under the bushel because we historically hadn’t made much effort to tell our story. I recently used some dryish humour in one of my presentations where I asked, “What is the difference between cooking sausages and eradicating polio?” The answer; the general public can draw a link between Rotary and cooking sausages.  

The bottom line is, if the general public has at times seen us as a secret society, that’s our fault, not theirs. These transformative journeys need to account for perceptions, not just realities, and we must make greater strides in communicating our narratives about who we are, what we stand for, what we do and the benefits of membership.

... from a Rigid Culture to a Flexible Culture - ★★★

It became very apparent to me when I first took up the role of District Membership Chair in 2014 that flexibility was what we were crying out for. I can remember in my earliest days of Rotary in the late 90s a very rigid culture full of rules and traditions. I feel we’ve been obsessed with process for many years to the detriment of outcomes. The staggering list of rituals observed at meetings included fines, songs, prayers, toasts, head tables, bell ringing, presidential collars and other trappings of office, strange looking boxes getting passed around for loose change, banners, raffles, and unwritten rules about who could sit in which chair. Clubs have always been autonomous, and able to self determine which customs worked for them and which didn’t. Of course every three years we hold our Council on Legislation to consider proposals to change our rules. This is a monumental, and very expensive festival of process, but it did deliver some extraordinary measures in flexibility back in 2016. The greatest cultural transformation from rigidity to flexibility I’ve seen in my time in Rotary came with the removal of the weekly meeting requirement. Corporate membership options were officially introduced at that council too, together with a raft of different club formats including satellite clubs, cause based clubs, and passport clubs. Eclubs had also been introduced in the early 2000s. We used to be very rigid about membership eligibility and classifications too. Despite RI’s interest in tinkering with different membership options, the bottom line is that RI membership is binary. You’re either a due paying member, or you’re not. Direct membership is currently being trialled in the UK, where one joins Rotary directly, rather than being a member of a specific club. So, I’ve got to give a big tick to our record of cultural transformation in the field of flexibility.

But flexibility at club level does not necessarily mean changing our constitution. Flexibility can be as simple as allowing members to pay their member fees in instalments, attend a meeting without purchasing a meal, bringing their young children along or joining the meeting online when they cannot attend in person. There are of course some clubs around the place that are still quite rigid with their rules and expectations on members, but I genuinely feel RI leadership has done a great job in enabling and promoting more flexible versions of Rotary.

... from a Culture of Member Attendance to a Culture of Member Engagement - ★★★

It has been quite some time since clubs were expected to keep and forward meeting attendance records to district officials. I’m not sure what ever happened to those records. Were they forwarded to RI? I can’t imagine any district official spending time pouring over those figures for an entire district. Proving your worth as a Rotarian by maintaining a high percentage of meeting attendance was once intrinsic to Rotary culture. 

Attendance rules have softened somewhat over the years, but there is still considerable pressure placed on Rotarians to attend meetings. That pressure can be overbearing at times. I know of a story not long ago where a group of young people were attracted to a club by the promise of international service opportunities. They quickly became very busy coordinating major humanitarian projects, but eventually left the organisation because of the continual badgering about their poor meeting attendance. They weren’t seen as “good Rotarians”. Conversely, we have many members amongst us who contribute little more from a volunteering perspective than the occasional turning of sausages, but because they religiously attend every meeting they are upheld as exemplary members. 

My personal approach is that I like to see members turning up to meetings, but I prefer to ask the question, “How are they contributing to the club?” RI leaders started talking about valuing member engagement over member attendance in the mid 2000s. I don’t know if any clubs still have attendance officers, and I haven’t heard the term “make-up” in Rotary circles for many years, but it is still possible for a member to be terminated after failing to attend four meetings in a row. The bottom line is we need to find ways to engage members over and above attending meetings.

... from a Culture of Business Leaders to a Culture of Business and Community Leaders - ★★★★½

There are some elements of this transformation which run parallel to our transformation from exclusivity to inclusivity. When my relationship with Rotary was in its infancy, the rule of thumb for membership eligibility was that you had to be able to “Hire and Fire”. I’m sure that term was more so Rotary vernacular than the exact wording in the Standard Club Constitution. I can divulge that when I was invited to join Rotary, it was under a fairly new rule at the time that made former Rotaractors eligible for membership. A few years later my wife and I bought a business and I was in the position to hire and fire, but the fact remains it was a recent loophole that facilitated my entry into Rotary. The eligibility has changed over the years to include community leaders, which is a fairly loose term, but basically if you want to give back to your community and are a person of good character, the rule book won’t restrict your entry into Rotary. Of course every club can decide who joins and who does not, and some will have stricter interpretations than others, especially in culturally differing societies. Many of our traditionalists feel the professional nature of the organisation has been diluted and the eligibility standards have been lowered too far. That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. The other way to look at it is that the organisation may have become extinct in the West had we not reviewed our eligibility criteria. We claim to be an organisation of business leaders, but we are largely an organisation of retirees. I once heard a Rotarian suggest “Rotary has lost its prestige”. I feel what Rotary has lost is its relevance to the business elite, the significance of which should not be ignored. Maybe the business elite are too time poor to attend weekly meetings too! Diversifying our membership mix to include people with a closer connection to the community increases our awareness of societal gaps. I feel this transformation has brought great benefit to Rotary, but we must keep our connections to the business community and its networks, and remember that one of our important avenues of service is Vocational Service.

... from a Formal Culture to an Informal Culture - ★★★★

The list of Rotary traditions, rituals and formalities observed primarily in meetings is considerably shorter on average than it was 20 years ago. I expect Rotary culture is following a general societal trend towards informality. I wore a collared shirt and tie to most of the meetings I attended for my first 10 years as a Rotarian (1997-2007), but over the last 10 years it has been very rare indeed that I have worn a tie, except maybe to a district dinner and on occasions when I am presenting. I can recall the Sergeant-at-arms fining Rotarians for not wearing their lapel pins to meetings, and I keep hearing calls for Rotarians to wear their lapel pins in public. Most of the time I’m in public, I don’t even have a collar on my shirt. 

I’m of the opinion that a certain level of formality is necessary to keep clubs functioning effectively and we can’t let every baby out with the bathwater. But we mustn't conflate the formalities of basic governance, ethics, courtesy and respect with ritualistic activities that no longer serve a purpose, and can act as a repellent to membership. The toasting, the invocations, the singing, the fining, the head tables, the presidential collars; they’re all disappearing from Rotary life. 

... from a Meeting Centric Culture to a Service Centric Culture - ★

I won’t beat around the bush with this issue. I have felt for a long time that we have an unhealthy obsession with meetings. We often tend to venerate the meeting as the epitome of Rotary life, and until we manage to refocus our energies and prioritise service, we will never reverse our membership decline. 

Most of our barriers to membership are inextricably linked to our meeting culture. Numerous RI surveys have revealed that the top two reasons given for not joining Rotary are time and financial demands. Without doubt the greatest drain on a Rotarian’s time throughout their Rotary journey is club meetings, and the greatest involuntary drain on a Rotarian’s finances is not member fees, but meeting costs such as meals, drinks, raffles, fines, etc. Throw in the potential for uninspiring speakers, daggy rituals, ordinary food/service/venues, and inappropriate fines, and you have the perfect member repelling storm. 

I’m well aware that our regular meetings are a highlight for an enormous segment of our membership base. They value the camaraderie and entertainment aspect of meeting culture and will fight against any threats to it. But we also need to understand the realities of our current demographics. In Zone 8 our average age is over 72, close to 85% of us are over 60 and we have more retirees than full time workers. We’ve experienced a net loss of 10,000 members over the last 10 years and 73 clubs have handed in their charter since July 2020. The demographic which is so attached to meeting culture is the same demographic we’re losing.

There is no doubt that many clubs still run excellent meetings in excellent venues with an excellent speaker program. But we need to look to the future and realise that our meeting centric value proposition simply won’t attract the vast majority of community minded volunteers looking for something to be a part of. I'm not saying that there is no place for meetings in Rotary, I'm simply saying we need to find other ways to engage our volunteers and facilitate impact in our communities. The longer we position meetings at the centre of the Rotary universe, the longer it will take to reverse our decline.

There are other transformations required...

Of course I'd like to see a transformation in our age profile. Whilst approximately 50% of the population is aged under 50, only 8% of Rotary's membership in Zone 8 is under 50. There are of course initiatives individual clubs can implement to become more attractive to a younger audience, but if we want to see a zone wide reduction in our age profile, we need to ramp up our zone wide cultural transformation efforts. By my analysis, the highest priorities should be in the areas of overtness, flexibility, member engagement and meeting fixation, which I have given a lower star rating above. These are elements of Rotary culture which we can directly control. Our age profile is not one of them. It can only change as a consequence of cultural transformation.

I'd also like our clubs to become more proactive than reactive. It's wonderful that clubs are responsive to needs in their communities, but I'd like to see Rotary taking the lead in building more fences at the top of the cliff, rather than sponsoring the ambulances at the bottom. Some clubs seem to be locked into a cycle of "cook sausages to raise funds, hold meeting to hear guest speaker, hand over cheque to guest speaker, repeat." I'd rather see more leadership and direction with the causes we support, rather than being a soft touch for external causes who could be cooking their own sausages.

My final thoughts are surrounding our tendency to focus on the past, and "the way we've always done it". If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got. A rear view mirror is an important safety feature in cars, but there's a reason it is so small. You cannot have your rear view mirror obstructing your view of the road ahead. A driver who focuses on what's behind him rather than what's in front of him is headed for a crash. Perhaps the biggest cultural transformation required is from a culture of looking back to a culture of looking forward.

As a simple exercise, can I suggest you check how your club's journey of cultural transformation is going? Draw up a chart and rank your own club from 1 to 5 stars on each of the 8 elements of cultural transformation I have identified above. You can only improve what you can measure.

Mark Huddleston, Zone 8 Chair of Club and Cultural Transformation.

A Leap of Faith

There have been two constants across my Rotary journey, which began as a Rotaractor in 1986: disturbing membership decline and pathological resistance to change. To suggest they are not interrelated would be delusional. This resistance to change became immediately evident to me as a Rotaractor in the early 90s. Rotaract was always an organisation with both males and females; that was part of the allure! At the time I joined Rotaract, I really didn’t know too much about Rotary. I was 18 and didn’t really know too much about anything. I certainly didn’t know the organisation was staring down the single biggest change in its (then) 81 year history: the introduction of women. Whilst I could not possibly imagine a Rotaract without women, it soon became apparent that there were plenty of Rotarians who couldn’t imagine a Rotary with them.

Club autonomy has always been important in Rotary, and every club had to vote independently on whether they would accept women into membership. At the time I was in the Rotaract Club of Edwardstown, which was sponsored by the Rotary Club of Edwardstown. It took that club a few attempts to get the naysayers over the line, but they eventually got there. Some members resigned over it. 30 years later and there would not be one member of that club who could possibly regret that decision. I would suggest their only regret was that it took them so long. But some clubs took much, much longer to make that decision. It’s incomprehensible to me that some clubs have steadfastly remained all male to this day, a day in which our RI President is female (finally).

Clubs across Zone 8 will have another important decision to make in a few months’ time. They will be voting on whether Zone 8 participates in a regionalisation pilot. But there’s a major difference in the wider ramifications of this vote. Unlike the vote to accept women into membership, where the clubs that voted to reject female membership didn’t impinge on other clubs’ capacity to accept female membership; any “NO” votes (or abstentions, which will count as a “NO”) to the regionalisation pilot will have a flow on effect right across the zone. All districts across Zone 8 require a two thirds majority of clubs voting “YES” for the pilot to proceed. To clarify, if just one district across the zone has 34% or more clubs voting “NO” to this proposal, the opportunity to run our zone in a way that best suits our region and its many cultures will pass on to another zone. And there are plenty of zones lining up to jump at this chance if we let it slip through our fingers. 

I’ll go into what’s at stake in more detail later, but first I will analyse our recent history of membership decline and its coupling with resistance to change. There is no doubt in my mind that the admission of women into Rotary in the early 90s was the biggest ever rule change from a membership perspective. Most (not all) of the organisation eventually came to its senses and decided that excluding half of our membership market was counterproductive. I am about to detail several changes implemented since then, all of which were designed to either directly or indirectly help Rotary reach new markets and strengthen its membership; and as you will see, every single one of them without exception faced opposition.

In the late 90s we relaxed our qualification criteria for membership. The former “able to hire and fire” rule disappeared and was replaced with “demonstrate good character, integrity, and leadership; possess good reputation within their business, profession, and/or community; and are willing to serve in their community and/or around the world”. The intention was to recognise that there were people amongst us who could make valuable contributions to our clubs and communities that weren’t executives and business owners. But many opposed this move, fearing Rotary would lose its element of prestige and dilute its professional culture. What many failed to accept however, was that Rotary had for some time been losing its relevance to the business elite, many of whom were increasingly time poor. This elitist mindset is still alive and well in Rotary.

The world’s first Eclub was chartered in 2001, ushering in a very new style of club which catered for a less geographic demographic. These clubs would cater for the nomadic, the FIFO, the shift worker, the isolated volunteers, or those who would otherwise struggle to attend regular meetings but wanted to contribute. But at the time there was still a strong feeling that the primary mission of a “good Rotarian” was regular meeting attendance. Because Eclub members weren’t physically turning up at a pub every week to order a chicken dinner, hand over their hard earned to a sergeant and listen to a guest speaker, they weren’t considered “true Rotarians” by many. It’s a mindset that still exists today.

This is not photoshopped!

A few years later there was a strong push to prioritise member engagement over member attendance. This was something that immediately resonated with me at the time. The concept of a “service” club which prioritised meeting attendance over service has always sat uncomfortably with me. Every member had to achieve a certain percentage of meeting attendance. It mattered not how productive the meeting was, we just had to be there. And if we couldn’t be there, we were to do a “make up” by attending another club meeting. 

It was around this time that “flexibility” became a bit of a buzz word in Rotary circles. It was well understood that our rigid structures were affecting our ability to grow our membership. The cost of membership, and those 50 odd chicken dinners and sergeant sessions was clearly becoming a barrier too. Those attendance rules were relaxed at the end of the decade, I can’t remember exactly how, but I think it was primarily a lowering of the expected meeting attendance percentage. And guess what? The traditionalists complained about that too. 

The 2013 Council on Legislation (COL) allowed for project work to count for attendance, i.e. it enabled Rotarians to use participation in a service project to count as a make up, to keep the attendance wolves from your door. Just imagine the aliens landed and we had to explain to them that in our service club our prime objective was attending meetings, and only if we exhausted all other options to attend meetings, could our sins be absolved by contributing time to make an impact in our community. They’d surely be questioning if there was intelligent life on Earth. But this was the Rotary way for close to 100 years.

From 2007 – 2013 RI offered a pilot program to a number of clubs across the world which allowed them to experiment with their meeting frequency. Another pilot program ran between 2011 and 2014 where 500 clubs were selected to trial associate and corporate membership, satellite clubs and other innovative and flexible options, all of which did not fit within the rule book of the time. These programs were oversubscribed. Thousands of clubs applied, but missed out on the opportunity.

The resulting feedback from those trials led to major changes being introduced at the 2016 COL. Corporate membership models were initiated, the requirement to meet weekly was removed and other meeting flexibility measures were introduced. New club models were introduced, including satellite clubs, passport clubs and hybrid clubs. I personally think the removal of the weekly meeting requirement had the opportunity to be a game changer.

So, how do you think these measures were greeted by the Guardians of the Status Quo? In the subsequent (2019) COL, proposals made it to the floor to wind back those massive changes of 2016. Fortunately, none of them got up.

The superseded pre-2013 logo (L) and the current logo (R)

In 2013 RI introduced new branding. 9 years later, that branding is still being rejected for largely nonsensical reasons. Many proponents of the old logo are ignorant of the process that led to this change. The 2013 branding update was introduced in response to the findings of a landmark review commissioned by RI into our branding and strategy.

Global strategy, design and experience firm Siegel + Gale conducted a survey of Rotarians and stakeholders from 17 countries, and reported their research findings to the RI Board in 2012. The presentation to the board is documented in Revitalizing Rotary, where amongst other things, it identified that Rotary had an identity crisis. But many are still contributing to that crisis, some wilfully.

I've no doubt there are many, many other examples of resistance to RI leadership’s attempts to modernise the organisation, but I feel I’ve conveyed a fairly comprehensive history of the steadfast rejection of progress in all forms. Meanwhile, our membership has declined by 24% across the zone over the last 10 years. It's important to note this is a 24% net loss. We've actually recruited 31,000 new members over that time, but have seen 41,000 leave (or die). Our inability to turn this around is not caused by a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will. And I am concerned that a lack of will, combined with an abundance of apathy, will see us miss the boat on the opportunities this regionalisation pilot could bring us. We can learn from history the perils of missing the boat. The primary reason so many of the Titanic's life boats weren't full was the belief that the ship was unsinkable.

I am currently part of a team of District 9510 presenters rolling out a presentation to every club in our district on the importance of this rare opportunity. Every club across the zone has been given the opportunity to see this presentation and ask questions. In my own district, it looks like every club will see it, and I hope that’s the case across the rest of the zone.

This is not the place to go over the entire presentation. If you’re in Zone 8 you will all get a chance to see it if you haven’t already. But I do want to illuminate a few aspects of this pilot that I see as important. And let’s be very clear with the definition of “pilot”. It’s an opportunity to experiment and trial new ways of doing things. If we do get the approval to enter this pilot, we hope to find ways to improve opportunities and support for our members and clubs, to better communicate our message on a wider scale and to lower member fees. Anything we discover will not just automatically be adopted. There will be considerable consultation across the zone on what gets implemented and what does not. But we won’t have the chance to discover anything if enough clubs vote “NO”.

Speaking with one voice.

Trying to deliver a consistent message across our country or zone is akin to herding cats under the current system. Every district has to agree to the content and delivery of broad scale campaigns, and that agreement is not always easy to get. District boundaries are pretty arbitrary. Apart from Tasmania, which is currently a one district state, the lines that separate our districts have very little geographic meaning and form anything but natural markets. They cross state and country borders in a method that theoretically encapsulates a quantity of Rotarians to make administration easier for RI Headquarters. Over many years of re-districting, borders have shifted and entire districts have been subsumed. District 9830 (all of Tasmania) has 47 clubs across an area of 68,000 km2. My district (9510) includes most of (but not all of) South Australia plus parts of the Northern Territory, New South Wales, Victoria, and even a part of Queensland where there are no clubs. This is an area of about 1.5 million km2 with 82 clubs. Why do I mention this? If Rotary leaders in Tasmania wanted to run a state wide marketing campaign, it would be much easier to organise than my district, which zig zags across state borders and intersects advertising markets.

Past RI Director Stuart Heal recently commented (I will paraphrase) that if the head of Toyota wanted to strike up a marketing deal with Rotary across our zone, they would have to deal with over 20 districts. It would be much easier to speak with one person.

Inconsistent branding at a club BBQ.

Meanwhile, we can’t even get all clubs to update their branding to reflect a global change introduced nine years ago. Even within clubs, branding is often remarkably inconsistent. Regionalisation could address this.

Quality and Consistency of Member Training and Development.

I have been fortunate to have been given a unique and rare perspective on member training across the zone. I have presented on membership at PETS, District Assemblies, Conferences, and dedicated Membership Seminars in almost every district of Australia, and both islands of New Zealand. I’ve met some truly remarkable people and have experienced a broad depth of pedagogy in this field. Some of what I have seen has blown my mind. But some has been somewhat underwhelming. The average Rotarian might attend a District Assembly or PETS run in their district 2 or 3 times over their Rotary journey, and would not have any consideration for the training taking place across the rest of the zone. But for some of us who have seen a lot of it, you begin to question the consistency. I believe every district and RI fee paying Rotarian across the zone deserves the same access to best practice training, and right now, it’s a bit of a lottery depending on where you are. Regionalisation could address this.

Membership Development.

Similarly, the members of District 9640 (Gold Coast and surrounds) have experienced unprecedented club and membership growth over recent years. Why is this district so far ahead of the pack, when most districts decline in numbers year on year, forcing the re-districting which has and will continue to happen? Because there are some extremely passionate, talented, and visionary individuals when it comes to the science of marketing and membership development, but they are not evenly distributed and accessible across the zone. Regionalisation could address this.

There are many other resources that are not consistent or universally available to every member in every club across the zone, especially those clubs in remote locations. Some districts do youth exchange really well (COVID ramifications notwithstanding). Some have amazing vocational programs. Some run much better conferences. Some have extraordinary public image campaigns. Some have modest levies; some are much higher.

Keeping costs down.

For those who doubt that regionalisation can drop member fees, understand that districts have already been returning unspent funds to RI and members. Some of this underspending is due to COVID related travel and accommodation expense decline. Regionalisation will look at how District Governors Elect are trained too. A respected RI staffer recently reported that 85% of RI expenditure is directed to current District Governor costs and training their successors. Surely it's worth exploring if there are more efficient ways to govern our organisation, and if our current district structure is fit for purpose. There must be savings available from the removal of duplication across the zone.

Resistance.

I recently had a brief chat with a good friend of mine who happens to be a Past District Governor. His comment was that he hadn’t seen enough detail, so he’d be inclined to vote “NO”. It was immediately obvious to me that he hadn’t seen enough detail, because individuals aren’t voting on this; clubs are. And it’s one vote per club, no matter what size the club is. I guess there’s a “better the devil you know” mindset we have to overcome. I can empathise with the “not enough information” mindset, because the rollout of that information has only just started. The architects of this pilot have been caught between a rock and a hard place. If they had prepared a comprehensive outline of what the pilot would deliver, our members would have every right to condemn the lack of rank-and-file consultation. But by putting forward a skeleton with such little meat on the bone, the concerns are in relation to a lack of information. But considerable information is available for those who want to see it.

Rotary CEO John Hewko recently identified the six biggest challenges facing Rotary International, and one of them is “Resistance to Regionalization”. This pilot has been awarded to only two zones, one encompasses Britain and Ireland, assumedly because they already have a regional leadership structure in place, and the other is here in Zone 8 because so much work had already been done over the last few years on a similar plan. Make no mistake. If we pass up this opportunity, there will be many other zones wanting to take it on. RI Leadership are heavily invested in these pilots, and the RI Board of directors are dead keen for this to get up and learn what they can from the process. If our example can uncover a better model, it could spread across the globe. If another zone makes a good fist of it, we could soon be moving to the beat of their drum rather than our own. 

A common question asked of the presentation team during their club visits, is "How exactly will the regionalisation pilot address our membership decline?" We need to understand that membership decline is not the illness, but a symptom of the illness. Some medical interventions address symptoms only, but some address the illness itself, which in my mind is predominantly about declining relevance and attractiveness to the volunteer market. If we can build and consistently convey our narrative, create new, attractive, inclusive and impactful clubs that people will want to join, lower the cost structure and better train and develop our members, I believe we can again make Rotary relevant to the public. The membership spoils will follow. But the question I would ask relates to that other aforementioned constant, "How exactly can we move beyond our historical resistance to change?" 

The number one reason clubs don't actually follow through on innovation opportunities is the crippling fear that change will mean losing members. Guess what? We're already losing members. 24% of them over the last 10 years. I will concede that we do lose a few members who feel the pace of change has been too fast. But I will guarantee we have lost many more because the pace of change has been too slow, not to mention those who never join us in the first place.

In addition to the information campaign currently under way, I am calling on the army of progressive changemakers within the zone to rally the troops and do whatever you can to foster a “YES” mentality in your club. I've mentioned apathy, and I've mentioned resistance. But there is also outright opposition to this pilot from certain quarters. I would encourage you all, in the face of such opposition to question the motives of those opposers, and maybe ask them to elucidate their superior plan to reverse our membership crisis. If there is one, I'd be keen to hear it. 

Please take the time to visit the Creating Rotary Tomorrow website, where you'll find everything you need to know about the Regionalisation Pilot. Let’s not look this gift horse in the mouth. In the end, we only regret the chances we didn't take.