Our next meeting will be Friday (10/18) at Newcastle Place 12600 N Port Washington Rd, Mequon, WI 53092.
Our program for this meeting will feature David Bialk - Mequon Fire Chief who will give us an update on the Mequon Fire Department. (Scroll down for bio)
The greeter will provide either the thought, a Rotary minute, share a family moment or a cultural tradition ... anything they would like to start off the day positive.
Upcoming "It's your Rotary moment" assignees:
Cindy Shaffer (10/18)
Fr. Mike Shay (10/25)
Alexandra Solano (11/1)
Kenneth Stelpflug (11/8)
Note: If you are unable to act as "It's your Rotary moment" assignee when scheduled please arrange for your replacement.
By Joe Otin, governor-elect of Rotary District 9212 (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan)
I gravitate naturally to statistics despite the negative feelings some people have about them. I think that information is the fuel that our world runs on and without it our systems will sputter, stall, and shut down. That is because statistics are significant in decision making.
When I joined the Rotary Club of Nairobi East, Kenya, 19 years ago, I was told that good Rotarians were defined by the regularity of their attendance, the frequency of their gifts to The Rotary Foundation, and most importantly by their ability to introduce new members to the club.
In my quest to be a valuable member, I turned to statistics as a way to demonstrate the credibility of Rotary to family, friends, and neighborhood skeptics. I learned all the important stats by heart and would spit them out at the slightest provocation. If someone happened to notice my membership pin, they would get a barrage of information enough to weigh down even the strongest weightlifter.
A different way
Only a bolt of lightning would get my victims to wake up again by the time I was done talking. I thought I was promoting the club but instead I was boring them to death.
Looking back, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that my recruitment efforts led to naught. Not a single person that I targeted with my facts and figures joined the organization. Yet other members invited guests to our lunches every week, and these guests eventually joined our club within a month or two.
One day I got a call from a business journalist who wanted to discuss the results of a survey that my company had recently published. This was not unusual because in those days I worked for a research company and media executives regularly called me for insights and information.
With over 350 films, panels, parties, and events, the 2019 Milwaukee Film Festival is our biggest yet, working ever harder at pushing Milwaukee forward as a center for film culture.
The Milwaukee Film Festival festival is an immersive, experiential monument to the artistic, technological, and philosophical power of visual storytelling. It's a celebration of the medium's unique ability to capture the beauty and tumult of the human experience, to bear witness, to give voice to the voiceless—all while never forgetting to have a great time. It's a tribute to the best of film, the best of the visual arts, and the best of human creativity.
Milwaukee Film is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to building a robust, community-based film culture in the Greater Milwaukee Area. We seek to support and foster local filmmakers, the local filmmaking industry, and a vibrant community of film fans, audiences, and patrons. In our wildest sunshine daydreams, Milwaukee will become a global center of film culture in which film and shared cinematic experiences are used as tools for entertainment, education, engagement, and community building.
As director of the CCES, Dr. Mark Schmitz plays an integral role in the programming of the center and will work closely with the new aquaponics system. In fact, it was Schmitz who advocated for the system’s installation.
Schmitz is well-equipped for the aquaponics addition. His master’s work focused on aquaculture, and his dissertation examined the ecology of walleye. Schmitz started experimenting with aquaponics in the late 1990s, when modern-day systems were still in the infancy stages of gaining popularity. Prior to his start at Concordia in 2017, Schmitz managed a private fish hatchery in Sheboygan County and then worked for seven years as an associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan. During his time at UW-Sheboygan, Schmitz was instrumental in setting up a “green roof”—a vegetative system on the rooftop of one of the academic buildings—and he also started a now-defunct aquaponics system on the college campus there.
“We were doing various experiments with the aquaponics system in Sheboygan and were able to identify, for example, which varieties of basil perform better and under what conditions,” Schmitz says. “That’s what makes me excited about this aquaponics system we’ll have at Concordia. It offers the chance to do meaningful research that will help the industry and help growers.”
