Sunset Rotary looking for new members

The Sunset Rotary Club needs more members and the International Rotary is helping.

The Las Vegas club, which has mostly Henderson and Green Valley members but is open to all Las Vegans, is one of 200 around the world to be given special exemptions to the standard Rotary membership guidelines.

Sunset Rotary gets to maneuver with associate memberships, and has a more wide-open policy to recruit retired people.

"We asked to become a trial club for new ideas," said Jack Childs, secretary of Sunset Rotary and a long-time member of several Rotary chapters.

When he moved to Las Vegas in 1989, he joined the Henderson Rotary.

"The district asked another fellow and I if we'd help start another club," Childs said, explaining the start to the Green Valley Rotary. That club is approaching its fifth anniversary.

Hew said the new membership ideas are unusual, especially the emphasis on recruiting retired people.

"It is unusual," he said, "because Rotary started as a working man's club."

Now, of course, there are also female Rotarians -- in fact, the president of Sunset Rotary is Janie Lynn. She said, "The associate membership plan is very positive. I think over the next year, we can double our membership."

The club now has just 12 active members.

Dick Miller, the immediate past president, said despite the shortage of members, the club gets a lot done.

Club members raised funds by handling the parking lot duties for the Senior PGA Golf Classic last fall. They also had a Thanksgiving flower sale.

The club donations went to, among others, the City of Hope Hospital in California, the Salvation Army food drive and "angel tree," and helped with the Boy Scouts' food drive. The club also will sponsor two junior-high students to go to the Rotary Teen Leadership Camp, at a mountain retreat in California in October.

The newest project will be the purchase of wheelchairs. The Sunset Rotary is buying two, which is being matched by the Rotary district.

"We're looking for people who need wheelchairs," Miller said.

Anyone who needs a wheelchair or knows of someone who does can contact Miller at 558-5476.

Miller said the permission from International Rotary to tinker with the membership rules is an attempt "to stop the decline in service clubs." He said the experiments that are successful among the 200 special clubs might be incorporated into the entire Rotary system.

"I feel there are all kinds of retirees sitting around who would like to be involved with Rotary," Miller said.

Sunset Rotary has also reached out to visiting Rotarians, putting meeting announcements in many of the Las Vegas Strip hotels.

"Probably on any given week," Childs said, "there are 5,000 visiting Rotarians from someplace in the world. They are generally not looking to make a morning meeting."

So, they are invited to the Sunset Rotary, the only Rotary club in the Las Vegas Valley that meets in the evenings (every Tuesday at 5:45 p.m. at Carluccio's Tivoli Gardens, 1775 E. Tropicana Ave.

Childs said the Sunset meeting has attracted Rotarians from all over the country, plus a Rotarian from Germany.

The Sunset Rotary got its charter this past January, although it had started meeting informally about a year ago.