Create the Club you Crave:
Rotary Club of Harrisonburg-Rocktown, Virginia
Five years ago, Meghan Schenker-Fulcher, then a teacher in Harrisonburg, Virginia, decided it was time to join Rotary. “As a non-Rotarian,” she says, “it started with a passion to connect more people in our community to Rotary’s mission: Service Above Self.”
Schenker-Fulcher visited several clubs but couldn’t find one that fit her schedule. “They weren’t necessarily a good fit for educators … and others who had 9-to-5 jobs but still wanted to give back.”
In retrospect, the solution was obvious: Can’t find a Rotary club that works for you? Create one that does. Joined by two other women from the community, Schenker-Fulcher pooled their brainpower, as she puts it, “to create what we thought would be an ideal Rotary experience for both ourselves and other women in our community.”
The three spent several months thinking through the kind of club they wanted. “We spent the summer of 2019 holding informational sessions, which allowed people to hear our story, understand the why, and get inspired to join,” Schenker-Fulcher explains. “This also helped us to see if this [club] would really be a good fit for the community.”
That careful planning paid off. Chartered in September 2019, the Harrisonburg-Rocktown satellite club, an offshoot of the Rotary Club of Harrisonburg, today has 36 members — and 26 of them are women. To ensure its relevancy, the club conducts annual strategic planning sessions, where it establishes major objectives for the year. “It helps us to keep things fresh and moving forward,” says Schenker-Fulcher, the chair of the club’s seven-person membership committee. “That helps us not only to retain our members, but to grow our club.”
This story originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Rotary magazine.