‘We need more hands’

Rotary Club hopes to attract more members with good deeds

NEWPORT - Where have all the volunteers gone?

That’s a question the Kaniksu Sunrise Rotary Club is attempting answer. Also known as the Newport, Priest River Rotary Club, the non-profit organization has been a fixture in the Pend Oreille River Valley for several decades now.

“The Rotary Club is in a unique situation,” Club President Elizabeth Glazier says. “Due to a generous donation through an endowment fund Rotary has a healthy bottom line, but has been lacking over the past few years to obtain new members.” Currently, the club has about a dozen members but due to several members being seasonal visitors, there are only about five to six members that come to the club’s weekly 8 a.m. meetings on Wednesdays at Rotary Park in Oldtown.

Fiscally solid, but membership poor, the club is hoping to attract more people interested in joining.

“We have so many good things going for us right now, but the simple reality is, if we are unsuccessful in obtaining new members, we won’t be able to keep going and/ or we won’t be able to do more,” Glazier says. “We need more hands in order to do more.”

The Kaniksu Sunrise Club is part of Rotary International, one of the largest service organizations in the world, according to the website www. rotary.org. The non-profit is over 110 years old and was founded in Chicago, Illinois growing to include 45,000 clubs around the world. Rotary’s goal is to promote peace, support education, clean water, sanitation and hygiene, grow local economies, and fight disease, to name a few.

Local clubs like Newport, Priest River set their own goals. The focus for the Rotary Club in 2024 is youth and education, says Glazier. Earlier in the year the club applied for and received a Rotary District 5080 grant for $10,000, which the club matched with its own funds to install a new outdoor basketball court at Priest River Elementary. This affects approximately 400 students, according to Glazier.

“Luckily for our club, King Concrete Works offered to do the job and donated time and materials to cover the job over the $20,000,” Glazier says. “Without their generous donation of time, labor, and materials, we would not have been able to do the job.”

Also in April 2024, the club started its Teacher/ Staff Grant Program, an initiative that supplies local teachers and school staff members with financial assistance to secure items for their classrooms, students, and/ or schools that they may not otherwise be able to get approval from their district for. From April to June 2024, Rotary purchased nearly $5,000 worth of goods for local schools, including exercise bikes, teacher training in Spokane, basketballs, math materials, light experiment materials for science class, a starting contribution to a new PTO group, and classroom materials and supplies.

The club is also looking for sponsors for its new Senior Student of The Month Award, which highlights students from Priest River, Newport and the Pendleton Oreille River School.

“Because our club knows that greatness comes in all shapes and sizes, we wanted to make sure we based this award off something other than academics or athletics,” Glazier says. “This award is based on good characteristics.”

The criteria for the award reads “For embodying and displaying admirable character traits including, but not limited to, compassion, kindness, work ethic, respect, responsibility, and volunteerism.”

The Rotary Club also awarded $14,000 in scholarships this year and plans to sponsor two snack and lunch stations for the annual WaCanId (Washington, Canada and Idaho) Bike Ride that attracts approximately 150 riders.

“Some of our more seasoned members would really like to be able to step down from their ‘titled’ positions into membership roles,” Glazier says. “We are looking to recruit a secretary, treasurer, vice president and someone who is willing to assist with marketing, social media, etc.”

The club is also looking for local school liaisons — someone to connect Rotary with each school in the Pend Oreille River Valley.

“This would greatly streamline our efforts and help carve out ways that Rotary could help with, and in, our local schools, including homeschooled and homelinked kiddos,” Glazier says.

In terms of connecting communities, the club continues maintenance and fundraising for the Pend Oreille River Passage Trail, a project through the Priest Community Forest Connection that seeks to build a pedestrian path from Oldtown to Sandpoint.

With all that and more on the club’s plate, Glazier hopes that more people will learn about Rotary and become interested in the opportunities to help communities, locally and abroad.

“We don’t have any eligibility requirement to join nor do we require that members attend the meetings,” Glazier says. “What we need is busy bodies with a passion for youth and education. Our goal is to serve our communities… That means public school students, homeschooled students, athletes, non-athletes, etc. We would especially love to have more connections and conduits into the homeschool and online school families.”

The Rotary Club is hosting a Back To School fundraiser Saturday, Sept. 7, 1-4 p.m. at Rotary Park, 68 Old Diamond Mill Rd. in Oldtown. There will be face painting, music, a bouncy house, food and drinks for purchase, a silent auction and lots of information on local programs and services for youth and families. All funds raised from the event will go to support the club’s Teacher/Staff Grant Program.

Drop-ins at weekly meetings are welcome. For kore information, email [email protected] or visit https:// www.facebook.com/NPRRotaryClub.