Members of our Club will be joined by students from local schools at 1.30pm on 19 November 2021 to plant 4000 crocus corms at Crown Close in Bromsgrove adjacent to the town’s War Memorial. The initiative represents our ongoing commitment to efforts across the world to eradicate polio for ever. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Members and Friends of Rotary will be very glad to learn that awareness of Rotary has been heightened further through the recent coverage in the Bromsgrove Advertiser and What’s On – Worcestershire as a result of the Club’s donation of £5000 to the Avoncroft Windmill Appeal.

Our international focus led the Club to donate £1000 to Thailand recently to support people through the difficult times caused by the Covid 19 pandemic. Local contacts of Mu and Tony Docherty in Thailand have ensured that the resources purchased reached the people who were most in need.

Our Rotary Club is delighted to be able to support local scouting with a donation of £500 to help sustain the Canoe and Kayaking Section based at Pikes Pool in Bromsgrove.

Gavin Albutt Section Chairman said, ‘Your donation and kind gesture will help so much in getting kids on the water and experiencing new life skills.’ 

The Rotary Club of Bromsgrove is pleased to be able to support the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings with a donation of £5000 to kickstart the fundraising campaign towards the restoration costs of the windmill to full working order; the mill was rescued and taken to the site in 1969 and officially opened for milling on 1 April 1977. Our President John Teece announced the donation at the recent Lammastide Festival at the Museum on Sunday 1 August also known as Loaf Mass Day when the Court Leet visited and ‘blessed the bread.’ John said, “The Danzey Green Windmill is an iconic symbol for the Museum, and for Bromsgrove, and the Rotary Club is delighted to be supporting the efforts to maintain it. We were really pleased to be able to join the Court Leet and celebrate Lammas Day at the same time as presenting the donation to the team at Avoncroft.” The windmill is one of only three surviving post mills in the Midlands (so called because the upper part of the structure pivots on a huge central post) with a Midland type brick roundhouse as a base. It was constructed around 1790.

The Rotary Club of Bromsgrove recently collected an unwanted garden bench in need of repair from a local resident and donated it to the ‘Men in Sheds’ Project at Stoke Prior for renovation and resale to augment their funds. The Club notes the ongoing success of the project, and the recent construction of a Land Rover Play Car for Stoke Prior First School is a sterling example of what the Shedders achieve.

Our members are very pleased to further support the project with a donation of £300 via the 2021 Shed Share Scheme.

The theme for the new Rotary Year which runs from 1 July 2021 until 30 June 2022 is ‘Serve to Change Lives.’ This theme embodies the commitment of our members to help our communities in Bromsgrove and those further afield in the UK and abroad.

Our Club has just begun a commitment lasting five years to fund the education of a boy and a girl at the Azad Choudhury Academy in Sylhet district in north east Bangladesh. It is an independent school which provides education for children from ten villages who otherwise would not be able to gain any education at all. Our undertaking is in partnership with the Rotary Club of Birmingham and the Azad Choudhury Academy Education and Welfare Trust which is a UK based registered charity actively involved in fund and awareness raising for the Academy.

The Sequal Trust is a small national charity which provides augmentative speech aids for people who are affected in such a way that they are unable to mix socially, to interact fully with their family and friends or in the case of younger individuals properly facilitate their education or possible employment prospects.

We are delighted that our Rotary Club has just provided £800 of funding to the Sequal Trust to support an adult living in Bromsgrove who has communication difficulties and suffers from spina bifida and hydrocephalus and is paralysed from the rib cage down. He is a wheelchair user and has the support of carers.

The funding will provide the man with a new laptop and printer which will enable him to keep in touch with family and friends, record his own personal information, deal with correspondence, purchase items via the internet and provide him with a greater degree of independence. This will give the young man ‘his window on the world’ as it has been explained to our members.

We are pleased to partner with the Sequal Trust to provide support in this particular case.

Our Club in conjunction with about forty others across the West Midlands has contributed over £15,000 to fund nine oxygen concentrators which have been sent to help combat coronavirus in India assisted by the charities We Care UK and Khalsa Aid. Assistant District 1060 Governor Amal Rampal a member of the Rotary Club of Bromsgrove has done a huge amount of work to organize the international shipment with Rotarians Jaz Dhaliwal and our incoming District 1060 Governor David Clayfield and the present District 1060 Governor Tim Bushell. The efforts of all the Rotarians involved featured in the Bromsgrove Advertiser on 2 June 2021, and Amal secured other media coverage as well. What a wonderful example of Rotarians embracing ‘Service Above Self’ to help others less fortunate than ourselves!