A new service club has been formed in Cochrane and area, designed to attract like-minded people who are interested in giving back to the community and have fun doing it.
Ryan Baum says the new Rocky Mountain Rotary Club is perfect for people like him, who saw all the benefits of living in the area, wanted to get involved, and saw a need for a slightly younger demographic who could raise money for worthy causes but also get together for a beer at a pub, relax, and shoot the breeze.
The new club includes people who are 21 to 45 years of age, with the majority in their mid 30s.
Some members of the former young professionals segment of the Rotary Club of Cochrane saw a need to fill a niche, so Baum said they decided a new club was the best way to go.
“Our thought was we wanted to connect with young professionals, a younger demographic. We wanted to cultivate, we wanted to continue to grow professionally and personally,” Baum said.
Most of the group he describes have young families or are starting a career.
Baum said his peer group recognized they had some basic outlooks that meshed, and the germ for the idea of a satellite Rotary club in the Cochrane area started before the pandemic hit.
“Personally, I found we were all users. We were at a field house, we were riding our bikes on paths, we were staying at campsites on the Bow, that someone in the past had raised money for,” he said.
“All these service clubs and community members before us did that.”
He added his generation got all the benefits of community facilities, but seldom asked about how they got there in the first place.
The question his friends often asked was, ‘what’s the next generation going to do to continue making improvements to the community?’
Those discussions led to an inevitable conclusion.
“As the past generation gets older and older and doing less and less, it’s now on our generation to do it,” he said. “We’re gonna take that baton.
“What we realized was there’s a lot more of us out there than we thought.”
He said they’re welcoming people from outside of Cochrane as well.
Another difference between the older and younger age demographics was that Baum’s group was busy with kids and careers and didn’t have the time to spare that older members perhaps did. Meeting at noon on a weekday (like the current Cochrane Rotary Club does) wasn’t very convenient for people with kids and careers, Baum says.
The established Rotary Club of Cochrane meets every week. The new, younger Rocky Mountain club decided twice a month in the evenings would be suit the club’s membership better.
One of those meetings is where they cultivate – that could mean bringing in a speaker, or someone who could provide something professionally, or personally.
After that section of the meeting is finished, they hold the regular meeting and talk about what’s going on. That’s the connect part.
“Then the second one, we’ll meet socially, at a pub somewhere, where we grab a beer and meet each other, so that way we connect with like-minded people,” he said.
All of this talk of a satellite Rotary club was progressing smoothly a couple of years ago, according to Baum, “and then the pandemic hit.”
Getting together in person wasn’t an option. But Baum said that, too, played a part in the evolution of the new club, since his generation was less reluctant to embrace the video technology involved in interacting online.
They accepted the challenge during the pandemic, however.
“It was kind of a nightmare but it kind of worked well, because our demographic was used to that and during the pandemic we were able to pull off a couple of events,” he said.
They hosted a series of drive-in movie events, and together with sponsorship and support from various community businesses and residents of Cochrane, were able to raise $60,000.
The fundamental founding principle for the new Rotary club is giving back to the community.
The food bank in Cochrane was overwhelmed during the pandemic and needed to expand their facility, and the $60,000 contribution was the final financial support they needed to complete that project.
Contributions and other funds raised by Rocky Mountain Rotary go towards local organizations meeting the needs of the citizens of the Bow Valley in the realms of food, housing, youth programs, community infrastructure and other community initiatives.
Their first golf event, the inaugural Rocky Mountain Rotary Golf Classic, is focused on raising awareness of the new club, and supporting the Glenbow Ranch Foundation Summer Camps for Kids, which provide an opportunity for families that might not otherwise be able to afford to send their children to camp.
The tournament will be held at Bearspaw Golf & Country Club, June 20 at 1 p.m.
Billed as a celebrity golf tournament, they will welcome well-known personalities from the CFL, NHL, and NFL, as well as from the music and media industries. One celebrity will be matched up with each foursome.
Some of the celebrities currently committed include current Calgary Flames player Michael Stone, Flames alumni Lanny McDonald, Perry Berezan, Theo Fleury, Jamie Mcoun, and Joel Otto, Canmore curling legend John Morris, Calgary Stampeders quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell, and former NHL player and coach Duane Sutter.
The Rocky Mountain Rotary Club is still looking for new club members, sponsors to help support the golf event and kids camps, as well as golfers. For more information, go to rockymountainrotary.com and grpf.ca/summer-camps/
