THOMASVILLE- Last Thursday, the Rotary Club of Thomasville newly installed president and board of directors discussed the coming year during their regular meeting at the Plaza Restaurant, with President Mary Beth Donalson promising an exciting year for the club.

With the Rotary International theme this year being ‘Create Hope in the World,’ Donalson said this year was going to be an exciting one, with their exciting community work being spiced up with a little fun this year.

“We have some outstanding programs prepared,” Donalson said. “We have lots of exciting community work going on and, like I said, we’ll be adding a little fun along the way.”

Angela Williamson, membership director, and her deputy, Will Felts, came up after Donalson to speak on the membership goals for the year.

“This is a call-to-arms, so to speak, for all of Rotary,” Felts said. “Most of you know this, but Thomasville is an impressive town, in both its culture and in its business. The reason, the people of Thomasville are doers.”

Phelps said doers are those who are already busy in the community, but have that work ethic that is invaluable for the programs that Rotary puts on every year.

Rotary’s goal this year is to reach 120 members, according to Felts.

“We are at roughly 112 members,” he said. “We wanna get to 120 members, every organization and business has retention levels, we lose roughly 12% of our members, so we need to grow roughly 12%, so if we need to grow to 120, that means we need to add 40 to 50 members.”

And Felts said that they are also looking to keep a finger on the pulse of their current members’ satisfaction within the club and finding ways to increase enjoyment. Williamson said that would involve interest surveys, satisfaction surveys, and for those who left Rotary, exit surveys.

Afterward, Barbara Williams-Anderson, community service director, came up to speak about the community service Rotary would be doing throughout the year.

“I do want to talk about a few that I really love and are near and dear to my heart,” Williams-Anderson said. “Of course, everyone knows about the impact project at the produce market, every third meeting of the month, we go to Second Harvest and we partner with them to do a produce market that Saturday following the third Thursday.”

She added that this would be at Francis-Weston Park, before continuing on to say that they would also be putting on one of her other favorites during the year.

“One of my other favorites is the First Responder’s Cook Out,” she said. “It’s just wonderful, what we do is we do cook outs for the police department, sheriff department, linemen, firemen, just a small token to give back to them.”

After talking on their other community service projects, she ceded the floor back to Donalson, who spoke on their upcoming golf tournament in August.

“Scooter Grubbs and I have been working for the last couple weeks to start getting the golf tournament put together,” she said. “We’ve got to get some heavy-hitters on our golf tournament, I have a big goal for our golf tournament this year. We’ve come up with some different ideas, as far as sponsorship levels, but we gotta have people hitting the streets, asking for donations.”

After addressing any other concerns and announcements from the Rotary members in attendance, Donalson called the meeting to an end.