May 23, 2011 Club Bulletin # 375
Program for Today: Story of the Weed Park Rose Garden
No Meeting Next Monday....Memorial Day...May 30, 2011
May 23 Invocation by: Dennis McDonald
President Tom Ward in his Rotary moment reminded us that the Rotary Member Classification System was designed to get a broad and diverse membership not necessarily based on occupation but to connect members through their careers and their community activities.
Rotary Guests: Colleen Davis from Iowa City and Brett Carter from Santa Monica, California...welcome fellow Rotarians.
Nathan Mather sponsored by Mark Mather and Jim Nepple is requesting membership in our club.
The Vocational Awareness Committee will be meeting next week after the meeting. Members are: Jim Nepple, Tim Nelson, Dave Stanley, Jessica Wittman, Greg Boruff, & James Elliott.
Mike Ruby told the club of the death of Betty Breckenfelder who is the mother-in-law of Chuck Moody and mother of Ann Moody. She was the First Lady of District 600 when Breck was the District Governor in 1990-1991.
Mike also mentioned that our club had won several recognitions at the Annual Conference. One for program fund giving, the Polio Plus Campaign and our recent insert in the Muscatine Journal... (Steve Jameson, Publisher and Rotarian made that possible).
Pack the Park Polio Plus Event will be on Wednesday Evening, June 29, 2011 at the River Bandit Stadium in Davenport... we will have tickets soon.
Brooke Mehaffey made a special request from us to help defray some of the local disaster costs experienced by our Red Cross Agency this year. With the many disasters occurring elsewhere in the nation and world giving locally has suffered and there have been many needs here, as well. If we contribute $354 we will be a member of the Savethe Day Campaign and will be listed as a Red Cross Partner in our region. Red buckets were on the tables for contributions. (and we did it!! )
Program: Mark Ryan, the executive officer of the Niabi Zoo gave an informative program on the updates and needs of the local zoo. Currently, Niabi Zoo is going through their accreditation process and is among the 230 accredited zoos in the nation.
Zoos today focus more on the visitors experience at the zoo than the focus on the zoo animal as in the past. The experience is more educational in nature rather than just a viewing of the big animal...like this is an elephant.
The major expansion at Niabi Zoo is to enlarge the current Elephant Exhibit from 2-3 which means an enlargement of the square footage of the containment space from 4000 to 13,000.
Another zoo thing today is sharing animals from zoo to zoo this keeps the genetics pool stronger and enables more zoos to have different animals.