Currently Featured Interact Club:
West Geauga

by Jim Bohinc
President Chesterland Rotary

For West G, this is year two of Interact. This year the WG club has over 140 signed up paid, student members! Three of the current officers attended RYLA over the summer. This past summer, WG Interact did a Polio Plus project at our club golf outing, raising about $500. They created an Interact display board and gave out free popcorn at the West G Frosh Fest, getting, 49 freshmen to join Interact the first couple weeks of school. They are doing an Oct 7th environmental project to clean up the Cuyahoga riverbanks with 50 kids. Also in October, a Teen Institute drug awareness anti smoking week for the school. Monday they are launching a SSSH project at the school.  In February they are hosting a school assembly on the Tuskegee Airmen during Black History month with Rodger Cram Speaking. They will donate a full set of books and videos about Tuskegee to the local library as their literacy project!

In January a save the Gorilla campaign in being planned, by recycling cell phones. A spring fashion show is being planned to raise $2-3K of funds. Possible uses are a water well project in Africa, or for the Green House, Geauga County’s new woman’s shelter. If you remember last year the WG fashion show raised $2K and started funding for the permanently named Teen Interact Room at the shelter. The final beneficiary of this spring project is still being discussed. Numerous other community service projects already also planned for the year.

Our three West Geauga Interact students of the year from last years WG inaugural year, either have joined or are help starting Rotaract clubs at Hiram, OSU, and hoping to get one going at Kent State.  Rotary's future is in good hands if we get the kids involved. We really need to make student involvement a priority within our district.  A PETS type training session about and for Interact at the district conference in April, could inspire a number of new Interact and Rotaract clubs being spawned in the district. The PETS session could also be used to train the new Interact officers from existing Interact clubs in our district. I have been encouraging all Interact clubs in our cluster to have elections of new officers for the following school year, by April 1st. This would allow the new officers to attend the district conference to network, learn, teach and inspire. This will allow the new officers to have all summer to plan for the new school year.

I think some recognition of this truly inspiring bunch of kids is in order. Attached are a couple of T-shirt designs they designed and are using for this year . One you will recognize, the other is their design for a TI drug awareness tee shirt against smoking and drug use.

The WG club leadership is mostly sophomores and juniors with 49 new freshman members. There are now about 23 committee chairs and co chairs in place, learning and planning events.

I would think RI President Bill Boyd might enjoy seeing what they did with his themed logo for their WG club T-shirts

They plan on hosting two RYE students at their Nov general meeting to learn about and promote RYE within the school. It looks like two-three WG Interact students are already planning to go abroad with RYE and at least one set of Interact parents wants to be a host family for RYE.

The kids have planned all this in the first month of school! WOW!

At Monday's Oct 2, 2:30 pm Interact meeting, they are inducting and handing out Interact membership pins to 120 new members.

And you think you’re busy?