(I should start putting in an "Attendees" section in here.)
8:08PM Start
8:10: Introductions:
- Hayet (sp?); French Tunisian, company is new in region; does PR for Samsung, World Economic Forum, and others.
- Puja (sp?) From L'Oréal; was with them in Canada, came to Dubai in December.
8:13 New Member Pinning
Matthew (one of the new members) tells story about how he got randomly pinned into a french soldier's team who had the same name as him at a VIP event in Abu Dhabi.
Niki predicts that Karim will have a beard when we see him next, because it's been so long since we've seen him (meaning he's been really busy - and, if he's been too busy for Rotaract, then, obviously, he won't have had time to shave for the last two weeks).
8:17 Karim Arrives
Pinning Ceremony commences. (And Niki was right. Karim shows up with a beard. Good to know that service above self still applies in Rotaract Jumeirah;))
8:20 Report on Fashion Event
- All the stuff we were working on last week is good. However, we've hit a possible snag:
- Islamic Affaris is ok with the program, but there's a third-party organization, security, that might veto it.
- We planned this right: we started talking with Islamic Affairs 3 weeks ago to make sure everything would go smoothly, so we are heading over there first thing in the morning tomorrow to sort it out and make sure we have the permissions we need.
- Everything else has gone amazing: we've got Saatchi, Time-out, we're going on 20Something on Dubai 1 on the 9th of May; a documentary is happening made by a Palestinian-American filmmaker who just did a documentary in Qatar about Sheikha ___'s (name?) charity work, and was passing through Dubai on his way to another shoot in another country for a few days when he found out about Senses and decided to do a pro bono documentary short on them. We hope we'll get to air a few seconds of the documentary or something on Dubai 1 to raise awareness for Senses!
8:28 Report on Entrepreneurial Mindset Event
- The committee met Friday.
- We need corporate sponsors for food, raffle prizes, and the T-Shirts with motivational quotes that we want to give everybody.
(Hopefully these will be more motivational than the shirts that my buddy and I tried to print in Cairo when Barrack Obama was about to be inaugurated into the White House, "في ٢٠ يناير، ما فيش بشكلا" (On the 20th of January, no more "Bush" problem - it's a pun in Arabic.) (Since we don't speak Arabic very well it might not even be a grammatically correct pun, but oh well) On the back they were gonna say, "اوباما يبارك فيك" (Obama Bless You) - but we didn't know if that would be sacrilegious (and we were lazy) so we never actually tried to get them printed.) Oh, I digress, back to the minutes!
- We want to target educational companies as sponsors because they'll be trying to reach the demographic that we'll likely get.
- 8:32 - We met with 3 out of the 6 speakers already, 3 more to go this week.
- 8:34 - Marketing & PR is assigned to Tomell and Karim; May 11th we'll go live with the marketing campaign.
- Sponsorships is assigned to Mathieu & Fyca
- Speakers is assigned to Josh & Varun
8:35 - Questions
- 8:36 - Ticketing & donations may require a license for the speaker or something - we'll find that stuff out when we meet with the hotel tomorrow.
- 8:41 - Here's an idea, we were in touch with the company called "Motivate" (Is that the link to the right "Motivate"), maybe they'd be interested in this event from a CSR perspective.
- 8:43 - Have you heard of Guy Kawasaki?
"Of course."
Do you think he's out of our league for this event?
"Yes"
Oh. . . . Lets make a new event after this one focused on Guy Kawasaki!
(Read his Bio or the Wikipedia entry on him)
8:45 Input from Sevan, the club president:
Rotary year ends in June: election time. Mehdi is club services director: recruitment, elections, etc. He came to me to talk about it. Nominate selves. More upcoming.
8:47 Meeting Adjourn.
Comments: What a good feeling! Everyone around the table sat back and just breathed, it was a breath of fresh air to have a meeting end early. It's the fruit of all the work that Sevan and all the other people in the club have done - I remember the "Crisis" meeting with Sevan some months ago when everything seemed out of steam and we weren't even getting together to talk about things - and so Sevan called a townhall meeting with everybody to talk about it. And then, in the face of some heated discussion, she worked through things and applied every suggestion and this what came out of it. We've got a feeling of accomplishment: things are moving forward, we're busy, and we're facing some hard challenges, but the feeling around the table today was that we're ready to face those challenges.
Now, that feeling wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the enormous amount of work that Sevan and Khadra have been putting into the charity Fashion show, and the support of everybody else for both the Fashion Show and the Entrepreneurship event. I am seeing people grow more confident as they start to feel that they have the ability to succeed at the tasks they're given - and everybody is energized by the successes of everybody else.
Now, I know a lot of things are hanging by a thread, and we could be right back to having to scramble to make things work out, but I'm seeing dreams come together and I'm excited about that, because for every dream that we make happen, Rotaractors that come after us will be able to dream bigger.
We had a lot of fun tonight, fed in no small part by the positive attitudes of the guests and their hosts, so thank you to everyone who was there, I look forward to seeing you next week!
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