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.