2005-06 RI President Stenhammar: Keynote address

Photo by Alyce Henson

2005-06 RI President Carl-Wilhelm Stenhammar at the 2006 RI Convention.

Keynote address given to the 2006 RI Convention on 11 June 2006. 

We have a Council on Legislation every third year. It is an opportunity for districts and clubs to have a say on our bylaws and constitution. And there is a procedure that when a proposal comes up, if a delegate wants to speak to it, he lines up with a green card. If he wants to speak against the proposal, he or she lines up with a red card. At the last Council on Legislation in Chicago in 2004, there was a proposal from Norway to extend the presidential year to two years. All the past presidents at that time lined up with a red card. If this was the Council on Legislation and the same proposal came up, I would line up with a green card.  

But I think there is another angle to it. Because apart from being the president, I feel I have been the foreign minister of Rotary International this year, because your Board has taken some very, very vital decisions this year. On Saturday, I shall be in Moscow because we shall celebrate, as of 1 July, the first-ever Russian district in the history of Rotary — a decision taken by your Board at the November meeting last year.

In May, I was in China, in Beijing and Shanghai, and we celebrated the 10th anniversary of those two clubs that have been there as provisional clubs. On 8 February, we celebrated that those clubs in Beijing and Shanghai were chartered — another historic decision by your Board.

At the Board meeting in February, your Board opened Vietnam for extension. There will be no clubs in Vietnam this Rotary year, but this, in my opinion, is the beauty of Rotary International. We can pave the way for next year, and next year's Rotarians can charter the first club in Vietnam because in Rotary we don't care who gets the credit.

We have opened Kosovo for expansion this year on a request from the United States and the United Kingdom. Kosovo is not a country in its own right; it's a part of former Yugoslavia and Macedonia today under the supervision of the United Nations.

And when I was in Thailand just a few weeks ago, in Chiang Mai, I was handed a license from Laos. The government of Laos has accepted Rotary, and last week we opened Laos for extension. And before the end of this Rotary year, we will have a provisional club in the country of Laos.

Now you are missing one country that you know I've been working very hard for, and that is Cuba. We had some internal obstacles. We had some official obstacles. We had a tremendous Cuba committee that met in Evanston and in Havana, and we were ready to go. We have a roster of 32 possible members in a Rotary club in Havana. But we got a message from Cuba that they were not ready right now. But we do have a Cuba committee next year, and I urge you, President-elect, to work hard because, in my opinion, it's not a question of if but when Cuba will again join the family of Rotary.

You have heard me talk many times about this convention being a convention of firsts: being the first in the Nordic countries, being the first in two countries, being the first in the second century of Rotary. But there is another first of this convention. We have since a few years ago a club in Rochester, New York, USA, where all the members have hearing problems — most of them are deaf. It's the Rochester Deaf Rotary club. And we have two members with us here today, and they are sitting right here. And the reason they can hear what I am saying is because there is another first in Rotary Global History: We have sign language for them.

I am not sure if you notice something with the bell. I'm quite convinced that you heard the bell when our chairman called this meeting to order. But did you see that it also twinkled, a little light when it was hit? That is the bell that the Rochester Deaf Rotary club uses in order to open their meetings, and it has been brought over here and we can use it for this entire convention so the Rochester Deaf Rotary club can enjoy our plenaries.

This club had some problems with their name. Because when they wanted to call themselves Rochester Deaf Rotary club, they couldn't do that. And I just thought that was wrong. But that was correct; the administration did exactly what our rules and regulations say: We cannot have a name that refers to that. But fortunately enough, again, we have a very good Board this year. So I went to the Board and I asked the Board to make an exception to that rule, and this is why they are now called Rochester Deaf Rotary.

I'm just wondering, why is it that a club cannot have the only name that can advertise themselves for new members? To me, this is a rule that we shouldn't have. I remember Past President Carlo Ravizza saying that if we have rules, let us follow them — and that's what we did — but if we don't follow them, take the rules away. This is a rule that I don't think is necessary. And I think we might have many rules like that. I think we should see to it that rules that are not up-to-date, that are not used any longer, that maybe come from 1905 or 1955 or 1975 or even 1995 — look at IT, how it develops — we've got to get rid of [such rules]. We have to go through all of this. We have to change because what is vital when we change is that we must adjust Rotary to the Rotarians and not the Rotarians to Rotary.

Have you ever had an apple tree in your garden, or any fruit tree? If you have, you know that you have to take care of them. They just don't grow by themselves and produce products. My mother, she planted once a peach tree. And she didn't really care about it. It didn't really produce anything. Then she finally started to work with it, and after 10 years that peach tree produced an apricot. That was a remarkable tree, but my mother was a remarkable person, so that fitted in very well. But if you have a fruit tree, you have to take care of it. You have the roots and you have the tree and when the leaves fall down, you need to leave them there so that the worms can take them. And they drag them into the soil and they fluff up the soil and they eat them and then they take care of the rest for the tree. And I think sometimes you need to prune that tree. Some parts will die, and you have to take them away. And sometimes you need to prune the tree very sharply, so far that you may not have a crop the following year. But the year again thereafter, that tree will produce a crop which is better than ever. So when you prune it so sharply, you make an investment for the future.

I think this goes for Rotary as well. We need to prune our tree every now and then. We have to take away those things that may not really be workable any longer. We have an administration that has increased — and that is all right — because we have added more and more programs. Maybe it's time we sit down and prune our Rotary tree and take away that which really isn't valid any longer. And maybe we need to make such a sharp pruning that it doesn't produce that much the following year but is an investment for the future, where we will have these great crops again.

I've had intercity meetings this year. I've had 90 of them, plus a few other meetings. I've had an opportunity of meeting at least 30,000 Rotarians, to mingle with them, speak with them and speak to them. It has been so rewarding to me. I have received so much more than I could ever give to the Rotarians.

I learned that membership is very important to us. And you know very well that I would like to see more women in Rotary. I've spoken about that every single time you have met me. But still only 50 percent of our members in Rotary are women. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, they have 25 percent; that has got to be almost the world record. This is something we should strive against and towards, as a first step, to get 52 percent, which is the ratio in the world population between men and women. We will get there.

But the very, very important part is the younger generation. We need to get the younger generation interested in us. We just had a Winter Olympics in Italy. I didn't watch very much of that, but it reminded me of Salt Lake City — to which all of you will go next year, by the way. I watched a lot of the Salt Lake City Olympics on television, and I personally believe that cross-country skiing is the ski sport. You really do a workout. You go 50k, you sweat, and practically no one watches it until you come to the finish — and then there's mostly Norwegians there. It's not surprising because they win most of the medals. But when I watched that, parallel to this cross-country skiing was snowboarding. It is a little tiny ski, where you go down, you make a loop and a swing and a circle, and you come down — and you get a gold medal for it. [That event] was a sellout. There were 18,000 spectators watching snowboard, and they were all in their 20s and 30s. I think most of us here are the cross-country skiers. We've got to bring in snowboarding. Because if we don't, in 30 years, when most of us are gone, there will be no Rotary.

We have been looked upon as a mini United Nations. I don't think we should be a mini United Nations. I think we should be a full worthy United Nations. We will never be as large as they are in [terms of] money but as far as number of areas and countries, we should be a full worthy United Nations. We have a very good connection with the United Nations. We are one of the founders of UNESCO, we've been working with [the UN] for the last 20 years through WHO (World Health Organization) and UNICEF for our polio eradication program and, since a few years back, we have the Rotary-UN Day at the headquarters in New York. I had the opportunity of speaking there in November. And I was reminded of the former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskj๖ld from Sweden and a statement he made about the United Nations. He said, "The United Nations was not formed to bring mankind to heaven but to save it from hell." I think that goes for Rotary International as well.

So, ladies and gentlemen, go out and do just that.

Thank you very much.