From Interact to Rotaract

I first joined Interact as a grade 9 student at my high school. The club only had about 10 members but as a new student to the school it was still intimidating doing something I had never done before. I thought it would be easier to go with a friend, so I convinced my friend to join the club with me and off we went to the first meeting. 

I immediately loved it. We did a variety of fundraisers at the school to fund our initiatives. Some of my favourites were raising money to buy supplies for the local Women’s Centre and selling our candy grams to raise money for Shelter Box. As the year went on, the size of the club began to grow so we decided to have elections for an executive council. I made the scary decision to run for President. 

I was nervous about my new role but at that point I knew all the members of the club, so it made running meetings a lot easier. Our meetings took place on our lunch break so we would have to ‘get down to business’ right away and they would usually take up the whole lunch. We didn’t have fellowship type events, but it wasn’t necessary because we were all at school together everyday.

After being so involved in Interact I knew I wanted to continue volunteering. My Interact teacher told me about the Rotaract Club of Ottawa where she had been a founding member years prior. I planned to join the club in my first year of university there. Unfortunately I found that once I actually started school, I was so busy that I didn’t feel like I would have time to commit to the club. So, I put off joining. Then in my second year I was still busy but was thinking more about how I wanted to join the club. After not doing anything Rotary related for a while I was nervous to join a whole new club with all new people. I didn’t go to a meeting until my third year of university, but I am so happy I finally went. 

The open table discussions in the meetings made it easy to feel comfortable in a new environment and the fellowship after meetings helped a lot with meeting and getting to know new people in the club. The fundraising and volunteering were very similar to what I had done in Interact, this too made the transition easier.

It was great to spend this past year with Rotaract and I enjoyed it so much I ran for Secretary for the upcoming year. So, for anyone hesitant about the transition from Interact to Rotaract, I would say just go for it!