October Cabinet Meeting
First Vice District Governor Report - October 2015

First I want to congratulate the 45 clubs or 93% that received Centennial Service Awards during last year and want to remind the Clubs that Lions International will be awarding new Centennial Service Awards this year and again next year so keep reporting your activities in the areas of Youth, Vision, Hunger and Environment.

After the last cabinet meeting I attended several Zone meetings where I witnessed good interaction between clubs. A reminder that for this round of Zone meetings we are going to hold four Regional Zone meetings that will be led by Second Vice District Governor Jody and myself. Cost of the meals will be twelve dollars and please RSVP so we can have the venues prepare the right amount of food.

In August, the First Vice District Governors and their partners in service along with some Leader Dog Chair's went to Rochester Michigan to tour Leader Dog School and hear about their program. Our group was the first to be able to tour the facility with the changes that are being made to make the facility state of the art. The completion of the project is scheduled for October 2016 and I encourage your club to consider donating to the remodeling project above your normal donation.

In the middle of September I along with over one hundred Lions in the State attended the US Canadian Forum which as usual was a great learning experience. We had many first timers that the event and witnessed what a great experience it is. A reminder that the Forum is not for District Leadership but is great for everyday Lions, Club officers or experienced Lions where old friendships can be continued or new friendships can be started. Next year's Forum is in Omaha Nebraska I encourage as many that can attend to put it on your schedule.

Last week I attended the Combat Blindness International World Vision Day event in Madison. I found that just like PDG Bob Falivino had indicated they have several programs that work in parallel to our programs. One of their programs that they do locally is they provide children's vision screening for all of the Madison school district. They also provide glasses to those in need. They then had a doctor from England talk about his inventions to aide with the testing of vision in third world nations though the use of cell phones with specialized applications. It was simply unbelievable what they could do including emulating what the person's vision was compared to the vision of a normal individual.

My partner in service Laurie and I attended the Council of Governor's meeting in Stevens Point this last weekend and received additional training in preparation for next year. We then sat in on the meetings on Saturday again to begin preparation for next year.

I have received communication from Lions Clubs International about my upcoming training in Japan and as part of that will be developing SMART goals for the district. I will be asking some of you for assistance in coming up with those goals. Also I will be starting to form my team for the District Cabinet for next year so I will be reaching out to many of you to help with that.

When preparing for the Regional meetings we found that some of Regions were geographically challenged in terms of distance between clubs so we are looking at changing our Region and Zone structure so that clubs could more easily interact with each other.

I thank you and your clubs for all that you do.

Yours in Lionism

First Vice District Governor
Eric Holthaus