Rotary in crisis in its birthplace: de Camargo
Addressing the Vision 2030 membership conclave organised in Madurai by incoming RI Director M Muruganandam, RI President-elect Mario de Camargo made it clear that membership should be the topmost priority of Rotary leaders at all levels, and went on to explain in detail the key and crucial terms and phrases in Rotary, which were often misunderstood.
One of his reflections was on three types of leaders he had encountered in Rotary. The first was “the leader who makes it happen, the second, who lets it happen and the third type is the leader who is surprised by what happened. If we get leaders who are surprised by what happened, Rotary will have no future. We need leaders who make it happen.”
Amidst applause he said: “In India, you are making it happen. I wish we had more Indias around the Rotary world.” With its falling membership, North America “is losing control of this institution. When I tell them this, they do not like it, but I am being candid and true. The fact is that Rotary is in crisis in the place of its birth. I believe that the currency in Rotary is not the money we have; our currency is members, our clubs and our districts. It’s a simple equation. But it took us too long to realise that.”
He next stressed upon the importance of Rotary leaders making succession plans; “we have to make the most of having top-down continuity, but this is easier said than done… continuity to some Rotary leaders means that I am establishing the rules and my successors will follow them. I want to see continuity when you pick up the phone and ask your successor before making a decision what he/she thinks of it. Continuity for me is respect… respect for your successor. We have to change our mindset, where some presidents, or directors, say I want continuity, but when he leaves, he leaves all his decisions on the table for you to follow. And some directors do the same. We have to start from the top. Be kind, generous, be a gentleman, consult your successor before you make a decision… that is true continuity. If we don’t engage our successors, nothing will happen, so continuity is basically respect.”
Dwelling on the importance of change, he said “the trouble with our times is that our future is not what it used to be. It changes every two, three, four years. Take for example the technology in cars. Everything changes at a substantial speed and society changes accordingly. If we don’t keep pace with the change, we will become irrelevant.”
De Camargo said he had been seeing the change in India since he first came here in 2008. “I can see the difference… new buildings, new highways, new cars, new professions. If your club doesn’t pay attention to the surroundings, and sticks to its old ways, you’ll lose members.”
Be kind, generous, be a gentleman, consult your successor before you make a decision… that is true continuity.
He then gave an example of his own home town Santo Andre, “an industrial hub and birthplace of the locomotive industry. But the locomotive industry moved outside the town. They went for cheaper land, better taxes and less expensive labour. We lost the locomotive industry; all its big shots were in my dad’s club… Firestone, General Motors, etc.” With all those companies gone, his club (RC Santo Andre) had to change, “to continue to be the same. If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. So my club changed to remain the same.”
The result was that his club, when his father was a member, had only 45 members; “today it has 167, because we are not afraid to change.”
He gave the example of his wife Denise; when he invited her to join his club, “saying it has 110 members who are very well established, and crème de la crème of our society, she said I don’t want to join your club, I want to do Rotary in a different way. I don’t want to have to dine every Thursday, with wine and whiskey. I want to have a different way to make Rotary happen. So I challenged my club to form a satellite club.”
This was done “on our dining table with 8 ladies; now 8 women can do a lot of good, or a lot of damage if they are contradicted. So don’t say no to the ladies. Today there are 57 members in our satellite club. And they don’t want to become a normal club because they don’t want to deal with the Rotary paperwork, bureaucracy, records and numbers. They want to do projects and have fun. Which goes back to the idea of Rotary a long time ago. We do good and we have fun. So that’s the core principle of her club and she is doing very well in her club.”
Moving forward, new ideas, innovations, continuity, partnerships, and new club formats were necessary. For example, there are only 9,000 members in Rotary satellite clubs in the whole world. “If we were a company, we would be bankrupt because we introduced a new product in the market called satellite clubs which are more flexible, more nimble and have less bureaucracy. But 8 or 9 years later, we have only one per cent of that market. That is not success.”
Satellite clubs will have to be publicised, as they are viable and give an opportunity for members who cannot belong to a legacy club or attend weekly meetings but still have the willingness and the drive to participate in a Rotary club.
Reiterating how important it was for Rotary to add new members in every which way, de Camargo warned the delegates that “Rotarians are going to get tired of me talking about membership. That has to be our focus, we have to increase members, because we are getting old… I am getting old. I’ve been a Rotarian for 44 years now. I am the first RI president to come from the RYE programme, do you know that? So I am a product of a Rotary programme.”
His club, RC Santo Andre, when his father was a member, had only 45 members; today “it has 167, because we are not afraid to change.”
On where to get members, he told the assembled Rotarians: “Why don’t we connect with professional associations? Lawyers, dentists, doctors, engineers, architects, printers, textile industry… all of them have their trade federations. I was president of a printers’ association for three years in Brazil and 10 years in Latin America. Very few members were Rotarians. Why can’t we engage with such associations? Because that is the type of quality we need. I don’t want you to go fishing for Rotarians out on the streets just to make the numbers look better. We have to keep the quality level, otherwise we will go into self-destruction mode. But to get members of quality is hard; we have to look into diverse talent pools, people who share our collective mindset. That’s not easy to find, but professional and trade association do have that kind of people.”
That was a lesson learnt from polio, he added. “We learnt that alone we can do a lot but if we partner, we can change the world.”
He recalled how once he had asked a top leader of the Gates Foundation why they gave so much money — $100 million a year — to Rotary when they had so many alternatives. “She answered very candidly: ‘Because you have 1.2 million volunteers, and you do not pay a single cent to your volunteers. So I suddenly realised that our biggest asset is not the $2 billion we have in TRF but our members. But we have stagnated at 1.2 million since 1996. Not India… not this part of the world, but in some areas. The birthplace of Rotary is in crisis. When I say this in the US or Canada, they do not like it. But we have to tell the truth.. that is the reality, and I am not here to sugarcoat reality.”
Convenor of the membership conclave for the five RI districts 2981, 2982, 3000, 3212 and 3231, RIDE M Muruganandam said the registration for this event was above 2,500, and beyond the capacity of the auditorium. Quoting the results of a survey done by RI’s RPIC (Rotary Public Imagine Coordinator) team on the awareness about Rotary across the world, he said to the question ‘Have you heard of an organisation called Rotary?’ the response in Taiwan among the people surveyed was 91 per cent followed by India at 83 per cent. But to the next question about the people’s understanding of Rotary, and how familiar they were with the work done by Rotary, the figure for India was the highest at 73 per cent, followed by Nigeria 57 per cent and Taiwan 54 per cent.
My wife Denise said I don’t want to join your club, I want to do Rotary in a different way. I don’t want to dine every Thursday, with wine and whiskey. I want to have a different way to make Rotary happen.
– RIPE Mario de Camargo
The incoming director said that even though India was “growing and glowing, and our zones have 4,856 clubs with 1.72 lakh Rotarians, the fact remains that we’ve had degrowth in two of our four zones and 19 of our 44 districts, even though our net growth was 1,341 members.” With the help of charts used in his presentation, he said 45 per cent of the clubs in our region were in the red zone, 35 per cent were in the amber zone and only 20 per cent in the green zone. If the clubs from the red zone were pushed to amber, and amber to the green zone, he estimated India could add around 25,000 new members.
Muruganandam also urged Rotarians to turn their attention on adding Rotaractors and Interactors to the Rotary family. Presenting an analysis on the prospects of boosting their numbers and why these numbers were not growing in India, he said that sadly enough, as many as 74 per cent of Rotary clubs had not sponsored even a single Rotaract club and 79 per cent clubs not even one Interact club. Also, 80 per cent Indian Rotary clubs had not even set up a single RCC (Rotary Community Corps).
“If we want this organisation to thrive over the next few decades, youngsters are very important,” he said, reiterating that he himself had begun his Rotary journey as a Rotaractor.
He also announced that PRID C Basker had decided to become an AKS member.
In his opening remarks, RI director Anirudha Roychowdhury said while the sluggish and falling membership of Rotary in the world was a concern, “the fundamentals of Rotary are on a very strong foundation. Our corporate governance is at its best and we have resources to pass through this period, where we have some membership blues, but we have to plan how to tackle this situation.” He was confident that under the “evolutionary and revolutionary leadership” of de Camargo, Rotary’s future was bright.
I don’t want you to go fishing for Rotarians out on the streets just to make the numbers look better. We have to keep the quality level, otherwise we will go into self-destruction mode.
Urging the delegates to embrace Rotary’s unifying policy and DEI guidelines, he added, “To make a significant impact in the community, we have to make our clubs stronger. Your priority should be to increase membership, engage with members and encourage clubs to meet the local community’s needs. Let’s use social media effectively to enhance our public image. Leadership development and innovative partnerships are other areas we need to work to meet our Vision 2030 goals.”
Complimenting RIDE Muruganandam for the multidistrict initiative and an overflowing hall with the event attracting a registration of around 2,500 Rotarians, RI director Raju Subramanian said, “This audience is a testimony of the strength of our zones. The backbone of our organisation is membership and without that, we cannot meet any of our targets, be it TRF contributions or service projects.”
He said it was a matter of grave concern that in the last 10 years Rotary had lost 1.2 million members across the world. “We must look at getting new members, and retaining them, to build the future of our organisation. We have to work together to get quality members, we are not interested in mere members, we are interested in Rotarians. We don’t need members who come and go with the president but members who stay with the clubs.”
74 per cent of Rotary clubs have not sponsored a single Rotaract club, 79 per cent clubs not even one Interact club, and 80 per cent Indian Rotary clubs have not set up a single RCC.
– RIDE M Muruganandam
Stressing the need for Rotary to get members of sterling quality, he added, “Once we have quality, the numbers will automatically go up. There are multiple avenues and areas through which we can grow our membership and create new clubs which are permanent and not only for the club president’s year of office.”
Subramanian said Rotarians need to make the effort to recover “the members we have lost. Please go to the members who have left Rotary, connect with them and bring them back.”
PDG S Balaji, RID 2981, chairman of the event, welcomed the gathering.
Great camaraderie
The great camaraderie between the incoming RI President Mario de Camargo and past RI President K R Ravindran was palpable at the Madurai event, right from the time the two met and greeted each other, through their meeting on the podium where they exchanged a spontaneous hug, and when the latter introduced the former, in a departure from the usual AV presentations that Rotarians have watched ad nauseum.
Ravindran said that at the Lisbon Convention, one “PDG caught my attention not because of his striking good looks, or because he was a South American, but because of the way he presented himself and the clarity with which he put forward his position. I thought he is bound to go places. And my instincts were right!”
Defining the hallmark qualities of an outstanding leader, Ravindran said “such a leader needs to be an understanding person, show compassion and have empathy. He should have the strength of mind, the ability to act as a strong-minded officer and to possess knowledge and determination to provide leadership during difficult times such as the Covid pandemic or the 9/11 attacks.”
RI was a very complex organisation, and one needs to have “a clear mind to be able to lead the RI Board and persuasively chair meetings. You have to be able to think on your feet, and direct the people on the Board… who are people of substance from different continents. Mario has demonstrated already that he has the capacity to do that.”
He recalled a near-crisis situation just before the Sao Paolo convention; “there was a meeting in President Gary Huang’s office and we were thinking of cancelling the convention, when one of us said let’s get Mario involved. Mario came in and salvaged that convention.”
The past president added: “In order to be RI President, one has to be a showman as you are the face and front of a very complex organisation. Mario is a showman, he is charming, as you all saw today, he is able to sit with all of you and pose for photos. To be the president, one needs communication skills to be able to inspire and motivate audiences all over the world. There is nobody of better wit and substance as your incoming president. He speaks so many languages… English, Spanish, German, a little of French, Italian and of course Portuguese. If he stays with you a few days in Madurai, he’ll start speaking Tamil as well!”
To be an RI President, one also needed to be a clever lawyer, to understand and differentiate between right and wrong, interpret the voluminous constitutional documents and disseminate effective instructions to both the staff and other leaders. Mario has all these qualities, and will make a great president.”
Both of them shared a background in printing, packaging and publishing. De Camargo had till recently run a huge printing company, which he sold a couple of years ago and is today a much sought after business consultant. Having served in various professional organisations and trade bodies in leadership positions “he is a global figure even without Rotary. I have served with him on TRF; he is bold, well read and makes decisions which are not always popular but best for the organisation. The fourth Brazilian to become an RI President, he comes down hard on stewardship issues and is very particular about how TRF funds are used. With a keen business mind, he looks at ways of cutting expenditure, operating more efficiently, and we are going to get a brilliant, highly motivated, disciplined, hardworking and supremely self-confident president heading Rotary in the coming year.”
In response, de Camargo had this to say: “Ravi rescued me from the Rotary freezer. Some PDGs are sometimes punished and left in the freezer because they do not always agree with the senior leaders and I was left in the freezer for 6–7 years, till I was rescued by Ravi. He made me a (TRF) trustee before I was elected RI director. So I never cease to say ‘thank you Ravi for having seen me when nobody else did.’
Addressing PRID Basker, who was in the audience, he added: “Basker was in the Nominating Committee which selected me as president. So if I do well, I will accept the compliments, if not I’ll give you Basker’s cell phone number!”
RB
