Regarding the club's multi-faceted Rotary Week of Service Project, our combined projects will actually run from April 17-25. There is NOT an international canned food drive. There is an annual worldwide Rotarians at Work Day, which occurs on the last Saturday of April (on April 24 this year). On that day each year, Rotary clubs around the world are urged to unite in working on some service project, of their club's own choosing. Because a physical District Conference cannot be held this year, due to pandemic restrictions, DG Elizabeth Mahoney, along with her successors in the Governor line, decided to create this Rotary Week of Service, which would culminate on the Rotarians at Work Day.
Rather than select a different project, our Prescott Sunup Club decided to back a project already planned by our Prescott HS Interact Club — a Canned Food Drive — and to enable them to expand that project and make it bigger and better. Subsequently, the Bradshaw Mountain HS Interact Club and the ERAU Silver Wings Rotaract Club, along with the Prescott Frontier and the Prescott Rotary Clubs, agreed to join in as partners on this joint project to collect nonperishable food items for the Yavapai County and the Community Cupboard Food Banks. This is winding up being the largest joint community service project Rotary has ever attempted in the greater Prescott area, as these six clubs work together.
Our Rotary Week of Service Project will actually kick off on Saturday, April 17 with the Cruise-In for Vets Classic Car Show. It will be held at the Gateway Mall, in the parking lot adjacent to the old Sears store — NOT at Findlay Toyota. (When the Chino Valley Rotary Club turned in its charter, we inherited the sponsorship of this annual Car Show.) Incorporated with the Car Show will be the kick-off for our Food Drive portion of our Rotary Week of Service, since all participants in the car show are being asked, via the attached publicity flyer, to bring nonperishable food items to benefit the Yavapai County Food Bank. Our exhibit space at the Car Show will be the collection point for all of these food donations brought to the Car Show.
Our collection of nonperishable food items will continue that week, and it will culminate on that next weekend on Friday, Saturday & Sunday, April 23-25. In addition to the high schools, we will have drop-off locations at Watters, Olsens' and TrueValue. We are hoping to add a couple of additional drop-off locations in Prescott Valley, and are waiting for those to be identified. Todd Clancy is developing an online-volunteer sign-up for shifts at those locations, between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., via our club's section on the new arizonarotary.org website, which has recently been created.
Also culminating our Rotary Week of Service will be our semi-annual Roadside Cleanup on that Saturday, April 24.
This is such a large and complex group of projects, I hope this explanation helps. As an added note: This Rotary Week of Service is going to become an annual event for our district. I have that word from our next two District Governors.