The Rotary
District Governor visited our club this week, and in giving her talk recognized
members of the club who had been active in Rotary District activities. I was
among those named, with my work as District Membership Chair and District
Speech Contest chair cited.
I had
almost forgotten about the speech contest, and not without reason. Although it
ended well, it was a volunteer commitment that sucked six months out of my life
and my business, with a considerable part of that time wasted, as far as I was
concerned. It taught me some valuable lessons about the perils of volunteerism,
and was the catalyst for causing me to drop out of Rotary beyond the club
level.
My
godfather, a wise man with some experience in such matters, likes to say that
no man can want for things to do if he’s willing to volunteer. A lot of good
comes of doing so, but the take-home lesson from the speech contest was never
again to volunteer for a job where I have to rely on other volunteers getting
things done.
One Man’s Child;
Everyone’s Orphan
Our
District Speech Contest was launched by a District Governor named Richard D.
King, who went on to become president or Rotary International. Rick is a
powerful public speaker and heavyweight attorney, and he felt that participating
in a speech contest at a young age set him on his path. I, too, am a great
believer in the value of learning to stand up before a group and communicate.
Once he
began the contest, his successors felt bound to continue it. But because none
of them had the passion that Rick did, nobody ever did the followup work to
establish procedures and systems for running it. When I took it on more than
two decades later, there was nothing in writing about how to do it, but plenty
of people who had done it before and were more than willing to tell me that
their way was the only way.
Many of the
people involved in the contest before had been educators, and they tended to
approach it as a classroom experience. I chose to run the contest as an
entrepreneurial competition that was judged more on overall effect than on how
well a speaker did a number of small, technical points. The educators were
infuriated, and dealing with them involved way too much time and aggravation.
Follow the Money
After a few
years, when it was clear that the contest was going to be a regular District
event, it should have been made part of the district budget. But nobody ever
did that, so the contest chair was responsible (and nobody told me this
beforehand) for collecting money from each of the 60 clubs in the district to
pay for it. Some of them had to be repeatedly harassed before they coughed it
up, which probably wasted 40-60 hours of my time.
And even
though I gave everyone explicit written directions as to how to proceed, many
of the Rotarian volunteers ignored them. Two months after the contest had
ended, I got an email from a mother wanting to know when her child would be
receiving her check for participating in the area speech contest. The person
running that contest was supposed to have paid it out on the spot, and I was
left apologizing profusely and seeing that it got done.
My legacy
was that I persuaded the next District Governor to put the speech contest in
the budget, so my predecessors haven’t had to waste the week or more that I
did, chasing the money. But they still probably had to go through a lot of the
other stuff. Better them than me.
