Brantford Sunrise News

Posted by Kevin Davis 
 

PROUD OF THEIR 2014 - 2015 YEAR

As the club began to prepare for the District Governor’s visit in September 2015, it gave them the opportunity to ‘take stock’ and realize all of the wonderful accomplishments achieved over the past Rotary year. 
 
Read on for 2014/2015 highlights:
 
  • Welcomed 5 new members to our Club!
  • Organized several successful fundraising events including our Fish Fry, which raised $15,000; Beer Tent at the City of Brantford’s Canada Day Celebration, which raised $15,000; and our largest fundraising initiative our Trip of the Month draw raised $45,000
  • We continued our financial support of several local registered charities including Alzheimer Society of Brant, Adult Recreation Thearpy Centre (ARTC), Kids Can Fly, Grand River Conservation Tree Planting project, S.K.I.P., Canadian Heritage War Museum, Participation House.  In addition, we supported the Canadian Nurses for Africa through District Grant
  • Strong and successful Youth Exchange Program including sending two students Outbound and hosting two Inbounds
  • Our members hosted several Fun Food events raising funds and awareness for Polio Plus, and also several club fellowship events.
Probably our single biggest achievement this year was realizing our long-term fundraising goal and making a  $250,000 donation to ARTC (Adult Recreation Therapy Centre) which provides physical and recreational therapy for disabled adults (e.g. stroke and accident victims). This donation to ARTC, will allow them move to a new and much larger premises to better serve the Brantford community.  This project was started by Rick Bullas and was completed in his memory.  Rick Bullas was a founding member of Brantford Sunrise Rotary and had a vision of the club creating a recreational centre that would serve seniors.  The Club was proud to fulfill his vision. 
 
Recently the Club participated in a visioning session with the support of the District.  Out of that session came our newest initiative.  An overwhelming majority of our members endorsed doing some initiative with our First Nation neighbors. The Six Nations Reserve (Canada’s largest) is adjacent to Brantford. Our community has a long and difficult relationship with our aboriginal neighbours  Our club thought it was time to take a different approach and decided to seize this initiative as a small effort to begin changing the nature of our the relationship and dialogue with our aboriginal neighbours. To that end the Club made a $35,000 pledge to support the Save the Evidence Campaign at the Mohawk Institute, which is one of only a few Residential Schools that exists still in Canada. The goal of the Campaign is to repurpose the building into a National Museum of Conscious.
 
We are proud of all that we have accomplished and continue to work on.  We are able to accomplish these things because of our many active and dedicated members.  It is the members of the Brantford Sunrise Rotary Club that are the major factor in the continued success of our club.