Our Club’s mission is to enhance the lives of people in the Prior Lake area and throughout the world. How do we illustrate this? For the 2022-2023 Rotary year, the Club set out to replicate a project by Stillwater Sunrise whereby they quantitatively measure the impact of their giving and doing.
We looked at who was directly impacted, and not indirectly impacted. So a child who receives a bed, obviously their parents would also be positively impacted, but we did not count them. Similarly, we all feel positive vibes and feelings when we are out doing good, and certainly we are positively impacted. We are not personally counted towards the number.
Some of the projects will continue to impact the same people for years, or even other people. When we supported the Books For Africa grant by Northfield Rotary, we purchased books. In the life of the books, how many will read or /use those books? We only looked at the impact for a year.
Some of the numbers were easier than others. The District Grant we did for Sleep In Heavenly Peace was to build 142 beds. So 142 people were positively impacted. For programs like the two ethics programs we did for students and Model UN event, we took the number of students that participated. And for the STRIVE program, it was the number of mentees and mentors.
For Prior Lake Rotary’s Lakefront Music Fest, it was the number of attendees for both nights, and for Pedal Prior, it was the number of riders that participated. For our donation to Smoke Signals for the Little Market That Could, we used the estimate for the number of people that attended the grand opening at their new location. And for our sponsorship of the Prior Lake Players performance, it was the number of people that attended.
We leaned on our partners, the organizations we supported financially. They were the ones that gave us the number of people positively impacted through our donation.
In some cases, we really had to use best-guess estimates. For Rotary Gateway Park, which we maintain twice a year, and decorate for the holidays, we worked with the City of Prior Lake to figure out how many people walked through the area. And for the repairs at Sandpoint boat launch that we helped pay for, we worked with the DNR to estimate how many people used.
We did not want to over inflate the numbers. When it came to Highway Cleanup, which we do twice per year, there were too many vehicles that passed through this stretch each year. We did not add those numbers in. The bottom line is that our numbers are likely conservative estimates. We should also point out that we had many partners that helped us reach these impact numbers.
Knowing these numbers allows us to tell a better story by tying our giving and doing to actual impact. It helps us as Rotarians to answer questions like, What is Rotary? Or, Why are you a Rotarian? When asked, we are able to say, “Our Club is made up of over 100 People of Action that positively impacted over 464,000 people through our giving and our doing last year.” Now that is something to be proud of!
Thank you for all you do to positively impact the lives of people in the Prior Lake area, and people throughout the world!
