December Planning Meetings

Despite the busy holiday season, we have squeezed in a few hyper-productive meetings to keep things moving along. The team has made great progress on our presentation, organizing printed materials and begun assembling our team outfits. 

We started the month trekking to Guelph and enjoyed Carolyn's hospitality for a Sunday meeting. After some lively discussions and a quality lunch, we embarked on a road trip to Stone Road mall... Chapters staff will not soon forget us but we are pleased to have begun assembling our GSE Thank you gifts for the Australians! 

Later in December we met at Chris's for dinner (and a meeting) and continued refining our presentation. Chris has acquired a great video intro for the presentation which will take our audience from coast to coast in 2 minutes.  

Chris models the latest GSE outfit- looking good!

Carolyn's Dog ensured security at the meeting

The Ladies working hard at Carolyn's

Dinner at Chris's prior to our December 17 meeting

Our Zone Training Weekend

Seven GSE teams from within Canada and parts of the USA got together in Toronto for a training session. We were joined by a Rotary Peace Scholar and a number of Ambassadorial Scholars so it was a large group. The included groups from Districts 7790, 7090, 7070, 6330, 7010 and 7080.

We leant a lot about Rotary and the GSE process. We were luck yo have Rebecca Crall from RI in Evaston come up and spend some time with us. The event was organised by Roger and Joan Haywood and they created a fun weekend packed full of sessions which ran perfectly to time. We came away better prepared for our GSE trip to Australia.

Our GSE tream posing with DG elect Bob

November 30th meeting at Shelley's

We had a productive day in Shelley's dining room, sorting out details on our presentation, printed materials and clothing items.  After a great lunch (Thanks Shelley!!) we wrapped up our planning session with a road trip to Mark's Work Warehouse and the always memorable Stone Road Mall in our quest for gifts for our hosts and suitable clothing items.

Our planning meeting

The team gathered at beautiful Mounstberg Conservation park when Dolf is the Manager. We got lots of work done and made some important decisions on clothing, business cards and brochures. We also started to map out our Power point presetation. Shelley showed us some of her pictures from her 2006 trip to Australia. The team were blown away by the beauty and the coastline. We can't wait for this amazing adventure to begin

(Carolyn, Jenna, Shelley and Dolf working hard)




It was not all work, and Dolf gave us a behind the scenes tour of the facility. Here is Dolf with one of the Owls.



























Dolf also encountered some other Canadian wildlife!

Saying good-bye to the Australian GSE team

31 October 2008

Shelley, Carolyn and Chris travelled to Waterloo to attend the farewell of the Australian GSE team. This was held at the impressive home of Michael and Mary Klien. Michael is past President of the Rotary Club of Kitchener-Conestoga. It was a night of laughter and tears as we all said our farewells. We got a small glimpse of what we will be in for and clearly soem life long friend ships have been formed in the past 4 weeks. We are all looking forward to seeing this amazing team in Australia in February 2009.

The GSE interview process was conducted in September and 4 team members and the leader were selected from all the applications. Meet the GSE team:

Shelley Walker who is an Occupational Therapist from Guelph

Dolf Dejong is a Parks Manager from Burlington

Jenna Vaicius is a Marketing and Communications Manager from Burlington

Carolyn Hurd is an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher from Guelph

Chris Byrnes (team leader) is a media consultant from Burlington

Our team met for the first time in October to start the planning process. We will meet 3-4 times a month until we depart from Australia in late February 2009.