Oak Bay Rotary president looks to raise service organization’s public profile

The first time Victoria Pitt tried to make cotton candy it was a disaster.

Helping out at the Oak Bay Tea Party just after joining the Oak Bay Rotary Club in 1997, she couldn’t get the hang of twirling the sticky stuff onto a paper cone.

“Oh my lord, I got coated that first time. I’m not so bad now,” Pitt said from her Cedar Hill X Road law office.

Elected president of the service club in July, Pitt is the fifth woman to take the Rotary reins. She looks forward to her one-year tenure as head of the 57-member club, which will include such duties as arranging the weekly lunch meetings and rolling up her sleeves to help out with community projects.

This spring Rotary members got together to do some maintenance at the Peter Pan water park in Carnarvon Park.

“We were out there scraping paint and refurbishing things,” Pitt said. “It’s great, because you get a bunch of people who know each other and you go out there and do something. It’s really a lot of fun.”

She gets the sense that some people don’t relate belonging to a service club with having fun. That can make attracting younger members a challenge.

“Most people associate us with white-bread, middle-class America,” said Pitt, who is 55.

But Oak Bay Rotary does have half a dozen members in their 40s. And noon-hour meetings are perfect for working professionals, especially those with children who may not be able to make it to evening meetings, she said.

Although the club does take on local work projects, it also fundraises for international projects.

For the past four years Oak Bay Rotary has raised funds to build and maintain a girls’ secondary school in a village in Malawi. Built on land donated from the local chief, the school enrols about 70 girls a year. Many of the students have gone on to university and one former student now teaches there. Future Rotary fundraising efforts will go toward drilling a well and building communal gardens so the school can be self-sustaining.

Such projects need to be showcased to ensure their success, said Pitt, who intends to “blow the club’s horn” more over the next year.

In addition to its weekly lunch meetings at Oak Bay Recreation Centre on Bee Street, the club hosts a Club in the Pub night at the Penny Farthing Pub on Oak Bay Avenue.

The next gathering is set for this Thursday (Aug. 27) starting at 5 p.m. Anyone interested in finding out more about the club is invited to drop by.

vmoreau@saanichnews.com