My Life as a Lion

I‘m not sure what happened but suddenly it’s February and there’s only five more months until International Convention in Hamburg where I will start my year as District Governor.

January has been an interesting month in the journey to DG and it’s suddenly all very real.

The year started with our last training session as Vice District Governors. This session included what would normally have been the first day of training at International Convention covering Leadership and Membership. There were also sessions on finance, conventions (MD and International), radio interviews and our visions for our year as District Governors.

My pin design

I will provide the detail of my vision in a separate post after our district convention in March but one of the things we had to do for the training was to provide Dave H (1st VDG from district 105BS) with our designs for pins and banners if we are having them. A sneak peek of mine can be seen here.

The training weekend was great fun and allowed us to gel even more as a group.

The following weekend was a club social visit to the Puss in Boots pantomime at the Solihull Arts Theatre (Oh yes it was). This is an event we have supported for several years and, as usual, was written by and starred local entertainer Malc Stent. Malc is an honorary Lion in Balsall Common Lions Club and gave us a good plug during the show.

And then the snow came! For those of you not in the UK I can tell you that the smallest amount of snow causes everything to grind to a halt. This was a fairly significant amount of snow for the UK and the planned membership and leadership summit for 19th and 20th of January had to be postponed.

Which brings me to the last weekend of the month and to our first experience of a Council of Governors meeting. The Council of Governors comprises the District Governor from each of the 13 districts in Great Britain and Ireland and the Chairman of Council who is elected by the council from the previous two year’s governors. In MD105 the vice district governors are invited as observers to the last two meetings of the lions year in January and April/May. Until very recently the VDGs could only speak through their governor but Lions is finally going through an evolution and we were allowed to play a full part in the meeting and even to vote on some issues that will affect our year. The meeting lasts two days from Friday lunchtime through to Sunday lunchtime and was an enlightening experience.

Lion Phil Robinson

The weekend ended with our selection of the Chairman of Council for our year. After some serious deliberations we decided to appoint Lion Phil Robinson from district 105SE. We look forward to working with Phil, and his wife Lion Jacqui, as our chairman for the coming year.

In between all this I also chaired a finance and administration committee meeting, attended a region and zone chairmen’s review meeting, a long-range planning meeting and hosted a Global Membership Team meeting and a DG team meeting. I also was at my club’s business meeting and our social which was an indoor duck race. We also competed in the region finals of the Lions skittles competition and narrowly beat off Warwick and Worcester Lions Clubs to make it to the final.

February brings four club visits, a district cabinet meeting, a Global Leadership Team meeting and most importantly of all some serious work in starting to put together a cabinet for my year.

Lion Simon Moss

@simonhmoss @MarstonGnLions @lions105m @lionsclubsorg

1820 miles travelled as 2nd VDG

700 miles travelled as 1st VDG

At least 800 hours since 1 July 2011 on Lions’ activities