Rotary Club

ROTARY CLUB OF CARDIFF ST DAVID’S

(Information input to site May 2010)

Our Rotary Club was formed in late 1983 and since its inception has met regularly at the St Mellons Hotel and Country Club and so we feel a close affinity to the community of St Mellons. There are many facets to Rotary membership but helping the local community is certainly one that we have practiced for many years.

In recent times we have supported the tremendous work done at the Community Education Centre, every year providing funding for their Summer Programme that has seen local youngsters enjoy trips out, sailing tuition and too many adventures to list here! Through the Reardon Smith Rotary Trust we have seen many young people in St Mellons get the chance to go on life-changing voyages on the Tall Ships… trust me, no one comes back quite the same!!

We have also supported the Community Crèche in conjunction with the Community Education Centre and we are totally sold on the quality of the service that this crèche provides to the children of those parents seeking further education opportunities at the Centre.

Rotary International promotes Literacy throughout the world and our local contribution is the “Pick-up-a book” scheme that operates from the Centre. It’s very easy, we supply a vast range of books and anyone can go along and pick one up to read, free of charge. We try to cater for all ages and interests and there are no formalities.

Homestart St Mellons is another organisation that has our complete admiration for the real help that it offers to young families. We have given financial support to Judith John and her team so that they can operate more efficiently but also some practical help by providing a Father Christmas and supporting Elf at the children’s Christmas party. Don’t tell the kids that it wasn’t the real one.

The Primary schools in St Mellons do a great job in giving the children a set of standards that they can work with to get them through later life and our Rotary Club has great admiration for the work done by the staff at these schools. We try to make their lives a bit easier by offering some help by way of small grants each year to help them complete projects that might otherwise not be affordable. We have also been able to go a bit further for two of the schools, giving larger amounts of money to complete bigger projects.

In Oakfield School we paid for a special play area where the younger children can not only play safely on the special surface but can also be taught the basics of road safety. We undertook this project to mark the 100^th year of Rotary International.

To mark the 25^th anniversary of our Club, we gave a grant to Meadowlane School to enable them to complete the purchase of a much needed school minibus. You may have noticed the distinctive Rotary logo on the minibus as it goes around the community.

Every year we take about 180 from the local primary schools on a special Rotary Kids Out day. In recent years we have been enjoying the facilities at the Rhondda Heritage Park and it has proved to be a great success every year. Not only do the children have a day out of school but they get to learn a lot about the heritage of South Wales (It’s so easy to forget that many of the children will not have seen coal before!). The adventure play ground also lets them get rid of some of the excess energy before we feed them all and send them home very happy.

The Rotary Club of Cardiff St David’s is committed to helping the local community but also supports many International projects. For example, did you know that in conjunction with World Health Organisation, Rotary has helped to practically eliminate Polio throughout the world? It now exists in only a handful of countries and we are still trying for a complete solution. At the last count there were only 84 reported cases in the world.

We also provide Shelter Boxes wherever international disasters strike. Each box contains a tent and sufficient essentials to keep 10 people alive and protected for many months. We have recently sent thousands of these boxes to places such as Haiti and China following the devastating earthquakes.

The money for these projects is raised each year through various fundraising events and recently we have been delighted to receive the support of BLOOMS Garden Centre. The staff and management want to demonstrate their commitment to the local community and have given help in a number of ways.

For example some of the staff have given practical help to the local schools with their gardening and allotment projects. As for Rotary, they have given us free use of their car parks for our very successful car boot sales and of course all the money we make from those events comes straight back to the local community.

Last year we also ran their Father Christmas Grotto in the run-up to Christmas and, although it was a great demand on our time at such a busy time of year, it was another way of raising more funds for the community. The feedback we received was very gratifying because it was not run on the commercial basis that seems to sometimes happen at this time of year.

There is a lot more to Rotary than I have briefly summarised here and if you would like to learn more we are always looking for new members. Why not have a more detailed look at our website www.cardiffstdavidsrotary.org and contact us for a chat.

Finally congratulations to Steve Harris for getting the St Mellons website up and running and we hope it will be a great success. We shall look to see if we can be of further help to Steve in his work in the community and our initial contribution has been some money to help run the minibus so that the lunchtime dining club can start again at the Beacon Centre.

John Griffiths

Rotary Club of Cardiff St David’s