In conversation with Nancy Rozance

Nancy Rozance is the current president of the Rotary Club of Longboat Key whose Rotary “career” started just over five years ago, around the birth of the club. She spent a year as president-elect while Susan McGuire served her term, and her president-elect is Brad Marner. She talked with Longboat Observer reporter Nat Kaemmerer about the Rotary Club, how she joined up with them and her goals for the club. 

What is the role of Rotary Club on the island? From Longboat Key, we make the difference with the Tuttle food pantry, an annual Veterans Day event, a recognition of our first responders and a water safety and drowning prevention program. We do things with other 501C3s in the area, for example, SPARCC and Stillpoint Mission and the Longboat Key Library. I want it to be a vibrant organization of individuals that are passionate about making a difference in the world.

What are some things Rotary focuses on? There are things that our club members are really interested in participating in. But it's like owning your own business, that you kind of get shareholders. We have shareholders, the Rotarians, and they can say, “You know, this, this is something that we would like to pursue and so that's it,” then we decide, “Okay, you know, at least have a group of people to support your project,” and then we can go after it. They're just Rotary Longboat Key projects that we really believe in, like first responder or Veterans Day events.

What drew you to Rotary? I knew about Rotary but I was never a member of Rotary. I love the philosophy of “Service above self.” Rotary has basically six avenues of service that they address; so we support education, provide clean water, promoting peace, saving children and mothers, growing local economies and fighting disease. So as far as I'm concerned, those are some of the most major problems in the world today. And a lot of those problems exist in your very own backyard. So those are the types of things that I could glom on to and say, “Man, I can make a difference in somebody's life.” It was important to be able to start to address those things that in this beautiful paradise we live in; that not too far from where we live, there are real issues that people face on a daily basis.

What are your goals? We're bringing in somebody from Rotary International to do a strategic planning because we're five years old now, so I don't know what we want to be when we grow up. So what this strategic workshop in January is going to do is to flesh out from our members, “What's important to you? What concerns do you have in the community?”

How do you plan to grow the club? We have four new members, and probably my goal is to get to 10 new members by June 30 (the end of her tenure.) We already know that we have several people that are extremely interested in becoming members in the immediate future, so I am jazzed about that.

How are you bringing in new members and growing the club? I'm an old sales and marketing person, and I think it's all about personal relationships. People are going to engage because of a personal relationship with a Rotarian in Longboat Key. And they're going to do it because they share similar values and share similar passions, similar interests. So for me, it's about outreach by each Rotarian to people in their immediate social circle.