Submitted by: Rick Bricker, District Governor Nominee 
 
This past week I had the privilege of spending time in Haiti with our District Governor, Debra Warner.  As you might imagine, we discussed Rotary every day covering a variety of different subjects.  One evening we got on the subject of visioning and how important it is.  This has prompted me to write this testimonial on what visioning has done for my club. 
I will share just a couple of things that happened.  To tell the whole story I would have to write a book.  I belong to the Brainerd Noon Rotary club and we did our first visioning plan in January of 2010.  I was president of the club at the time and was a little nervous about whom to invite to participate.  I went with a diversified group; young, old, new, experienced, and not so experienced.  Things went well as we moved through the process.  At the end, as we were recapping, we discovered that the one big thing that we wanted to happen right away was to address the recession that had our economy at a standstill.  The people in our community had sad faces and we wanted to see smiles.  One of the Rotarians, at the visioning had an idea of doing a Positive Charge Campaign.  This involved FUN-raising $10,000, which we did.  We than invited the public to get their picture taken with a sign and positive statement on it.  There was no charge to the public for this.  We than rented an auditorium and invited the public to view all the photos.  We also served pop and cupcakes to them.  A local chef baked the cakes.  Next we printed 1000+ laminated posters and distributed them to all businesses that would display them.  We also rented billboards, did newspaper articles and radio.  The project was a huge success and only happened because of participating in the visioning plan. 
 
We also determined that we wanted to do something special for our 100th anniversary.  Details of this emerged after our second Visioning Session.  We established that we wanted to hold District Conference, do a significant project, and have a member of our club be District Governor.  In 2020 the District Conference will be in Brainerd, our project is our park and we intend to have a bird watching station built by 2020.  The cool thing about this project is that it was just a dream in 2010.  We did not even own an acre of land.  Today we have about 175 acres and 1800 feet of Mississippi river frontage.  Learn more about Brainerd Rotary Riverside Park on the Brainerd Noon Rotary Club website,  http://www.brainerdrotary.org/brainerd-rotary-park.html and view a video of a very productive service day.  Picture
 
If your club has not participated in the visioning process please do.  You will not be disappointed. 
 
Your visioning coordinator is –
Cheryl Knudson
Fargo rotary
 
P.S. Oh yeah.  The District Governor will also be from Brainerd in 2019-2020.  I know him personally.  Happy Visioning!
 
Rick Bricker
D.G.N.