I think we all learned a lot from last week's speaker Graeme Woodside, CEO of Prostate Cancer Foundation, and received a strong message for each of us (or our significant others) to have a regular annual checkup for prostate health. Our Sunshine Fund collection was donated to the Blue September Prostate Cancer Awareness Campaign.
This Thursday, we welcome Tiff McLeod who works for Cure Kids, a charity initiated by Rotary 46 years ago. We look forward to hearing from Tiff about her personal story and about Cure Kids. St Johns has an especially close association with Cure Kids through members Beryl Robinson's governance role and Frances Benge as CEO.
Election night was rather intriguing, and a good lesson in the realities of MMP Democracy. We await the outcome of special votes and decisions to follow. Recapping on our four pre-election Rotary speakers, two are returned to parliament as expected (Simon O'Connor and David Seymour) and of our two new candidates Sam McDonald gained a creditable 6667 votes (though well behind Simon), and Chloe Swarbrick came 3rd in Maungakiekie but becomes a list MP for the Greens and at 23 (though she dislikes the stats) the youngest MP in 42 years.
This report contains words and information some members may find disturbing!!!
Graeme opened by explaining the Prostate Cancer Foundation in NZ has been in existence for around 20 years and started as a voluntary organisation. Around five years ago the Board made a strategic decision to establish a National office in Auckland. The original team of two has now grown to six. The Foundation deals not just with Prostate Cancer (known as an ‘older men’s disease’) but also Testicular Cancer (‘younger men’s disease’). To generate awareness of Testicular Cancer, for the first time this year the “Go Balls Out” campaign was rolled out. The campaign asked the public to create cock and ball maps across the New Zealand landscape by using an exercise app such as MapMyWalk. Once the walk (aka cock and ball masterpiece) was created, the idea was to take a screenshot of it and share this with the hashtag #goballsout and tag goballsout.org.nz. Thanks to social media the campaign went viral (reaching 190 countries) and created superb awareness of this particular cancer which kills more young Kiwi men than any other cancer. (We dare you to Click onto the link for more...)
Please let us know if you have a connection or suggestion for guest speakers. We pride ourselves in having interesting meetings with diverse speakers and value member input to help with our speaker roster. Please don't hesitate to contact Brian Fergus, Peter Buchanan or Namrata Gulani with your ideas. Refer end of Bulletin for email details.
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Please let us know if you have a connection or suggestion for guest speakers. We pride ourselves in having interesting meetings with diverse speakers and value member input to help with our speaker roster. Please don't hesitate to contact Brian Fergus, Peter Buchanan or Namrata Gulani with your ideas. Refer end of Bulletin for email details.
