November 16, 2022 Breakfast Meeting Notes
November 16, 2022 Breakfast Meeting Notes
We opened with Tony’s NH Trivia, Younger/Newer Members’ Edition. Tony also announced that fundraiser this Saturday night 18th at the Knights of Columbus, in the parish hall of St. Michael’s Church.
 
50/50 was won by Scott. Card game draw was by Tony, who was unsuccessful at finding the ace of spades.
 
Our speaker today was Marcus Weeks, who was recently named president of Meredith Village Savings Bank. He addressed the value of embracing young people and furthering their education. All businesses need to attract the next generation of employees to their communities so that they can have a full workforce. All sorts of businesses are dealing with an aging workforce and it is imperative that they find new employees to replace those who retire.
Marcus drew from his own life experience; he started as a student teller in the summer of 1995. Having students work as tellers helps with scheduling regular employees, so that they can have more break time, and gives the students valuable experience in the real world. He held that position for several years before being asked to organize files instead. He worked his way up, working on mortgage processing and then became a loan originator before moving to the business banking division. He was promoted to senior vice president and ultimately to bank president.
 
The program in which he participated ran for about 20 years and also worked to bring students into other businesses, such as auto repair and other vocational fields. He knows of 20 students who worked at Meredith Village and of those, 7 are still there, with 4 in senior management. Ultimately the program was discontinued, partly because of the complexities of using student workers (if a student didn’t work out and left the program, it could impact their credits toward graduation). However, one of his goals is to bring the program back. He also plans to start a commercial loan program to train students starting next year. The human resource department at Meredith Village is also speaking to the state, which has its own mentoring program, to see if the two programs can coordinate.
 
Meredith Village Savings Bank also prides itself on its commitment to the community. They issue charitable grants to community organizations. Employees are encouraged to do volunteer work and to increase their volunteer work each year. The bank is a corporate member of a couple of other Rotaries in the southern part of the state and would be happy to become a corporate partner here as well.
 
Other topics discussed:
 
Mike is looking for people to help set up the Styrofoam collecting project. The first collection is anticipated to be in January at the ReStore.
 
The December 7 meeting will include voting on our new officers and board of directors. If interested in serving, please see Mike or Beth.
 
Braden thanked the senior members of the club for effectively mentoring the newer members and guiding them through their first Penny Sale. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we raised about $30,000 for our programs. Suggestions to improve the sale for next year included writing down a PDF of all the procedural steps so that next year’s workers have a clear process to follow, starting the process of preparing earlier in the year, and folding raffle tickets ahead of time so that we have a less hectic experience on the actual day of the sale. Kudos to Alicia for her hard work with the financial aspects of the sale, to Sharon for keeping the data base current, and to Steve for establishing a platform so that we can readily accept electronic donations now and into the future.
 
The next big project is the Hometown Holiday Celebration. The downtown green will be decorated on the Saturday after Thanksgiving starting at 9 am. Please bring tall ladders, wire cutters, and sturdy gloves. Alicia is looking for people to help build the float on November 22. Steve will need people to help set up the bonfire on the morning of December 3 and to run the Chill-Buster on the evening of the 3rd.
 
The board will have its next meeting by Zoom this Friday morning at 7 am.
 
Respectfully submitted,
Lora Miller, secretary