The club was formed in 2012, to fill a gap in the service organisation representation in the leafy corridor of the western suburbs of Oxley, Sherwood, Corinda, Graceville, and Tennyson.
The Club meets each Tuesday Evening at 7.00pm, normally at The Sherwood RSL sub-branch in Clewley Street, Corinda.
Each month we hold at least four meetings, at two of these we aim to present Guest Speakers. Another is a Business Meeting with the fourth dedicated to a Dinner Meeting, where we meet as a Club at a local venue that has chosen to support us during our fundraising activities. Where there is a fifth Tuesday in a month, we endeavour to organise a Vocational Visit, usually hosted by one of our members or a friend of Rotary.
Our Club is inclusive of all who wish to participate, with an average membership number of about twenty. Our Membership is a wide range of mixed genders, backgrounds, careers, community roles and ages and our Members ages are spread from eighteen to the mid-seventies. Most of our members live locally within this catchment, but not all.
Our Club is now, and has been involved in the past, in numerous projects, some of which are listed below.
- Through the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, our International Student Food Relief Project provided urgently needed assistance to international university students who were trapped in Brisbane with no income and no government funding. These weekly packages included dry and tinned foods, long-life milk, cooking oil, fresh fruit and vegetables and other forms of assistance.
- Our annual educational sponsorship of Christerbell Eliakimu, a student who has just started High School at the School of St Jude in Tanzania. We have sponsored Christerbell since the start of her education in Grade One.
- Our refurbishment of the kitchen and dining area of the Malalaua Star School in the Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea was an International project we completed recently, giving the school somewhere safe to cook, and the students to eat their food.
- Our regular participation in the Rotary Youth Exchange Program, sponsoring local students out and hosting overseas students in for twelve-month educational exchanges.
- We have supported and sponsored our young adults to Rotary programs such as RYPEN (Rotary Youth Program of Enrichment) and RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards).
- We have undertaken fundraising and provided support to Sailability at Chelmer, raising much needed funds so they could purchase two boats and safety equipment.
- Our Clean Up Australia Day activities each year, has given us the opportunity spend some time cleaning up Taylor Bridge Park on the banks of the Brisbane River.
- We also support the various Polio Plus movie premiers hosted by the Regal Twin, a boutique arthouse theatre in Graceville, to raise money for the eradication of Polio.
- We are also major supporters of the Australian Rotary Health group, a group who are committed to raising funds to research Mental Health in Australia.
- We have supported the environment by joining with other local Rotary Clubs on several occasions, to plant trees on the grounds of the Oxley Creek Common in Sherwood.
- We have over the recent years contributed to the annual Christmas Lunch for the Sherwood Respite Service, and we also replace one of their large commercial refrigerators.
- On a weekly basis, our club sponsors and host the Breakfast Club at the Milpera State High School. Milpera SHS is an intensive English language program school, for young immigrant and refugees.
We also took advantage of many opportunities to raise valuable funding for these and other projects, some of which are.
- Our annual Rotary Fun Run each September in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Brisbane Centenary, which raises large amounts of funding to support The Wesley Hospital’s Choices program, Beefbank, Foodbank and other Rotary community programs.
- We host an annual Trivia Night to raise funding.
- Our members can be seen at the St Joseph’s Sport Grounds in Graceville, marshaling the staff, players, and spectators’ vehicles at the home games for Gregory Terrace during the GPS football and Rugby seasons. On a busy day, the crowd can swell to more than 10,000 people.
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