Rotary President-elect Ian Riseley shares his four key reasons to get involved with Rotary and your community.

If a young person asked you why he or she should join Rotary what, in order, would you say?

There are four elements. The first one is friendship. Rotary offers the opportunity to meet people in a semi-social environment and also achieve good things.

The second one is personal development. I became the third president of my club at a very young age as I was starting up my accounting practice. I didn’t enjoy speaking in public, but being involved in a Rotary club means that you’re encouraged – some would say forced – in a friendly environment to get experience speaking, running meetings, motivating people, all that sort of thing. Your Rotarian colleagues are not going to fault you for a simple mistake. So you get practice, you improve, and you do it better. I’m not quite as shy anymore, so that’s a significant benefit.

The third is business development. We’ve shied away from this over a period of time, and I don’t believe we should. When I was invited to join the Rotary Club of Sandringham, I told Juliet, “Well, they’ve invited me to join this group, what do you know about it?” She knew about the same as me, which was not a lot, but she made the point that we’d make new friends, and hopefully some of them wouldn’t be accountants because too many of our friends were accountants, as if that could possibly be true. Rotary is good for business. Why should we shy away from promoting this?

The fourth one, and by far the most important, is the chance to make a difference in the world. If someone asked me to eradicate polio, my ability to do this would be rather limited. But when you gather together with 1.2 million people of like mind and have people like Bill and Melinda Gates donate funds to help achieve this objective, the opportunity for success is far greater.