Area of Action or Territory

During many years it has prevail the concept of club locality as its territory, to define the limits of action of that club. With the purpose to increase membership or even to promote extension, the clubs were incentivized to share its locality or territory or promote the cession of part of it to charter a new club.

Some of these changes have been done without the necessary correction on its Constitution and By Laws. As a consequence important information was lost, particularly the identity of the club with the community it served or should serve.

In localities where three or more clubs are chartered, it starts to be undefined in which community these clubs should be concentrating their efforts to render service.

This is more evident when governors in their official visit are repeatedly invited to visit the same local authority. I was asked one day while I was a district governor by one of these authorities, when I was visiting him for the fifth time on that year, taken by the club President of that locality: “Governor, if I want to talk to Rotary in this town, whom do I look for?”. A clever question and the answer was only one: “You must talk to the eight club Presidents of the clubs in this town”.

In another occasion I was questioned by a club president that acted in an area of the city where on weekends many families like to go to the several gastronomic restaurants that exist over there. These families were approached on their cars by fellow Rotarians of other clubs to sell promotion articles for collecting contributions for their promo-

tions. He asked if it was not possible to put an end on that “territory invasion”?

After those occurrences we had a meeting with the representatives of the 30 clubs on that city and asked every president to inform which was the community to which his club renders service. Some of them have a quick answer, because even by the name of the club they were automatically connected to the community of a neighborhood. Others while trying to identify the limits of their club’s community demonstrated that there was a lot of superposition or an excess of area or even a complete misinformation of which it was.

A redefinition of limits was necessary. We then used the concept of Area of Action and defined together with the club presidents the new limits when necessary so they could approve it on their club assemblies. All clubs agreed that they have a common territory that was the limits of the city and although being able to serve in any area of the city they will concentrate and focus their action on the polygonal of streets and avenues that limit their Area of Action.

This was a concept that was accepted by all clubs and increased their identity with a community that they could know better and be known as Rotarians by them.

With the definition of these Areas of Action, some areas of the city remained uncovered by a club. It helped to identify which was the Area of Action of a new club to be chartered in the future. The city in this case study was Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, Brazil.

It was also understood that whenever a project was to be done that affected the whole city, all clubs were going to be involved in a joint effort, like for instance in a polio immunization day, because the city limits was now their common territory.

The statement of Paul Harris was also remembered: “Rotary was created to care for small communities”. The several Areas of Action represented these small communities in the medium and big size cities.

Each club was then able to elaborate a plan to understand the needs of the community within their Area of Action and define the priority projects to fill those needs. An invitation was made to clubs in other cities with the same situation to follow this example allowing a development of Rotary with order and adequate to the community needs and its evolution in time.

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