In conversation with Brad Marner, Rotary Club of Longboat Key president

Brad Marner is the new president of the Rotary Club of Longboat Key, installed via Zoom in late June and now holding meetings over the videoconferencing platform. The club has no plans to begin meeting in person anytime soon, but Marner is making plans to keep members together. Marner was the manager at Ameris Bank on Longboat Key before that branch closed and now works in Bradenton, but still feels attached to the island community. Here’s how he hopes to keep one of the community’s service organizations afloat during the continuing coronavirus pandemic. 

When did you get involved in Rotary Club? 

My first time was three years ago. My father was in Rotary in my hometown, but I was young. Then when I became a manager on Longboat, I felt like I needed to be more involved in the community, so that's when I decided to look into Rotary.

Why did you take on a leadership role? 

I guess I didn't really think about it, that that would be a possibility, but I could kind of sense they were going to ask me. I don't know if I really wanted the position, but I decided I would do it. Working full time and doing our Rotary Club, it's been a challenge. Carol Erker and Nancy and Jack Rozance (former presidents) are kind of kind of helping out without me even asking. There's just no way I can put the time that those people are putting into Rotary, because normally a Rotary Club is pretty much all business people over lunch, so there's usually not a whole lot of projects like this club.

How will the club look during your leadership? 

At this time, it's just hard to do face-to-face mission-based activities because of COVID, so we're trying to be sensitive to that but yet be able to help people who are in need. So this is kind of a tricky, fine balance that we're trying to do. It is very difficult to lead a meeting through Zoom. I can see all their faces, but they're all just staring at  the screen. I think it's going to be virtual for the foreseeable future. Our club is a little bit on the older side, so they're very reluctant to get into groups. But we can also continue to do virtual and in-person ... since we now have the technology to do both, I think it's going to happen, where we’ll have half people in person and then people who can't will be able to watch a livestream. We have snowbirds that now attend every meeting. And then we also have a member who would come over here in the winter from the UK, and now he joins us every time we have a meeting, from the UK.

What changes do you want to bring? 

I'm just trying to keep the club moving forward. We're having some issues with ... people stepping into leadership roles. We're trying to work  on succession planning, so, (planning a) fundraising (event) hasn't been a strong push as of yet. I don't know if we still have plans for that. We have to be more creative if we're doing fundraisers mostly online or virtual. We still continue to get donations. People keep just giving. I mean, who does that? Just all of a sudden they say, “Here, I'm gonna give you 100 bucks or a couple hundred bucks or whatever.” And when that happens, you don't have to do a lot of fundraising.

What do you want to focus on? 

Our club is unique because we do a lot of service projects. Nancy (Rozance) always says, “I just don't want to write checks.” We want to be in the community, hands on helping people and not just handing out money. We have 40 people who are willing to go to the food bank or going to Tuttle Elementary and reading to kids or handing out lunches to emergency personnel or the fire department. We're going to focus on some of the local issues mostly, so we'll focus on (Veterans Day) and the emergency personnel. But we also have a heart for kids, so we have a couple of kids organizations that we're starting to kind of dig into. SOAR and the Children's Guardian Fund have just been presenters in our club since I've been president, and it's really struck a chord with all of our members.

What are your goals for the club?

I want to have a joint meeting with (a Longboat member’s) club in the UK at some point. And that's what these new Zooms can do. We could have a joint meeting. Now that's an option where before, it really was not unless you were traveling and then you could just have one person there. We could share a speaker or a presenter. The other option is we can go on to our Rotary calendar, and we can see other clubs and what their presenters are or who they are, and that that will didn't happen before unless you are willing to go to that club’s meeting. So there's some pros and some cons, you know, the personal interaction isn't there, but then your options for presenters can be a lot more wide open. We're now over 40 members, which I think is a good number. We had a three year plan and I thought we could get to 50 in three years, which is a year and a half from now. We're on our way.