Our President Elect Faisal Sharif has been involved in organising a table tennis tournament at RGS Dodderhill School in Droitwich for Bromsgrove players partly sponsored by Bromsgrove Rotary. The tournament started on 17 June and is continuing. Faisal even had to step in and play last week himself! Some great pictures capture some of the players in action.

Bromsgrove Rotary working in partnership with the KidsOut charity have funded a number of summer excursions for local children attending Chadsgrove School, Aston Fields Middle School and St John’s Middle School. Teachers have organised trips to different venues including Avoncroft Museum, Birmingham Sea Life Centre, Black Country Living Museum, West Midlands Safari Park and Drayton Manor. Pictured are students from Chadsgrove enjoying their visit to the Avoncroft Museum.

Rotarians in Bromsgrove are full of praise for local host families providing a home and safe environment for Ukrainian displaced adults and children so sadly affected by the war in Ukraine. The Club is grateful for the funds made available by Rotary International and is using some of its own charitable funds to allocate to Ukrainian guests to help them settle in. Working in partnership with sponsors in host families we are seeking to allocate emergency funding as quickly as possible to support immediate needs.

The Club is very pleased to be able to fund equipment for Bromsgrove Community First Responders and support their operational needs at a cost of £2500. Community First Responders are volunteers who respond in their own time and without pay to emergency 999 calls within their local community, and as lay people generally they receive the necessary training from the ambulance service. The Responders are expected to raise money to cover the costs of their uniform, equipment and vehicles, with training and consumables provided by the ambulance service.

The Club is delighted to be able to support a student with a visual impairment at South Bromsgrove High through the purchase of equipment at a cost of some £840 which will allow the student to achieve their full potential.

Our club is delighted to be able to support a young and enterprising local cellist on her musical journey. She has been awarded a place in the National Scout and Guide Symphony Orchestra and will take part in a ten day residential course in the summer culminating in three performances in August 2022 in the Midlands, one of which will be in Coventry Cathedral.

On 12 April 2022 our Club met for a meal at the Maekong Thai Restaurant in Worcester Road Bromsgrove where we were hosted by the owners and Rotarians Tony and Mu Docherty. We were delighted to welcome our present Arkwright Scholar Adrian Fok whose interests and ambitions lie in aeronautical engineering. He spoke to members and spoke of some of his experiences and what he is deriving from the Scholarship sponsored by the Club and awarded through the Smallpeice Trust. In particular he spoke in some detail about hopefully viable rockets which he has built of which one is capable of carrying a camera. We wish him well for his forthcoming A Level exams and then progression to university.

The Rotary Club of Bromsgrove is pleased to be working with and supporting a local group of volunteers taking aid to Poland to help displaced Ukrainians. Donations to help fund future trips can be made through our Club or directly to the volunteer group at www.facebook.com/busaruk

Many thanks!

Our Club is delighted to have been able to support emergency repairs to the nave beam of St John’s Church with a grant of £7,000. Press coverage has been given in the both the Bromsgrove Advertiser and Standard newspapers. https://bromsgrovestandard.co.uk/news/friends-of-bromsgroves-historic-st-johns-church-beaming-after-grants-see-repair-work-completed/

Friends of St John’s Chairman Jo Slade said everyone was enormously grateful to the Rotary Club of Bromsgrove for their continued support and delighted to be awarded the Council’s Community Grant.

She added, “It was important the work was carried out quickly and that the problem didn’t get any worse. With the age of the original oak beams, and the height at which work was carried out, this was always going to be a costly repair.”

The church has reopened now that the beam is safe.

Rotary Club President Tony Docherty said: “We recognise the importance of St John’s Church to Bromsgrove as a heritage building and as a community asset, and so we were delighted to be able to help with the financing of the nave beam project.”

Rotarians in Bromsgrove have supported the Primrose Hospice in the first week of 2022 with a donation of £1500. We acknowledge the sterling work carried out by our local Hospice and its staff and we recognize that opportunities for normal fundraising activities have been curtailed severely by the ongoing public health situation.