If you thought you needed an invitation to join a Rotary club, you would be mistaken.

All that is required to join the Farmersville Rotary Club, for example, is for the applicant to know a member of the club. The member then becomes your sponsor, and you then go through the process of joining formally a premier community service organization.

But, as Bill Dendy, a leading North Texas Rotarian noted, “you have to be accepted by the club,” which requires a vote by a Rotary board of directors. A single negative comment from any Rotarian in the club can nix an applicant’s desire to join a club.

Dendy, who resides in Dallas, spoke recently to the Farmersville Rotary Club on a wide-ranging array of topics covering Rotary. He touched a little bit on the rule change regarding admission to a Rotary club.

Rotary International at one time had laid down strict rules for the number of occupations any club can accept into membership from those seeking to join. It used to be that clubs could have so many doctors, real estate agents, lawyers, journalists or any other professional occupation. Then the rules were relaxed. A late great West Texas Rotarian, Paige Carruth of Canyon, used to say that “there isn’t an occupation out there that cannot be turned into a Rotary club category for its members.” Dendy said many clubs then broadened their classifications, noting that clubs would expand their roll of lawyers by allowing “various categories of lawyers; you could have tax lawyers serving with criminal defense lawyers.” The same was true for other occupations, he said, citing “real estate agents. You could have Realtors dealing in commercial property and those who deal only with residential property.”

RI would relax its rules on professional categories for those seeking to become members of a Rotary club.

Dendy is a lawyer and a certified public accountant, but his Rotary job is as foundation chair for District 5810. He laments the idea that we still use “numbers to identify our districts. I mean ‘5810’ doesn’t mean anything to anyone.” He said he prefers that Rotary identify its district by location, such as “North Texas or east of Fort Worth.”

He advises prospective Rotarians to try out several clubs to see which one suits his or her taste.

“We have clubs that still require members to wear business attire at weekly meetings,” he said, “but we also have after-hours clubs” that allow for much wider clothing requirements. “It’s also good for someone who wants to join to attend a Rotary club board meeting,” he said, “to get a taste of the projects the club is working on. A potential Rotarian can judge whether a club’s projects are a good fit.”

Rotary clubs used to have strict attendance requirements, but “those requirements by and large have gone way down,” Dendy said. He noted that a club in Houston would dismiss members if they missed more than two or three meetings in a row. 

The Farmersville Rotary Club meets Tuesday at noon at the O.C. Carlisle Civic Center. Those interested in joining the Farmersville Rotary Club may call club president Robin Edwards at Lexington Medical Lodge, (972) 784-7770. 

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