PDG Kevin Learned (Boise, Idaho -- 5400)
Kevin Learned almost quit before he ever started.
“Done”: What Kevin Learned Learned
By Sean Spence, Rotarian (Columbia, MO — 6080)
Not the year itself — the training. Somewhere in a hotel ballroom in Texas, listening to memos about which clothes to wear to which dinner, and how, if you were a very good boy, you might one day rise to Director of RI, Kevin nearly got up and walked out. He showed up to a governors’ lunch without a necktie. When a fellow candidate asked what it would take to get him into one, he told her he’d wear a tie to her funeral and nowhere else.
He’ll tell you now that he was an ass about it. His word. He challenged the trainers, questioned every “you have to,” and burned a few bridges he wishes he hadn’t. It’s the first thing worth knowing about a conversation with Kevin: he doesn’t flatter himself, and he won’t flatter you. That honesty is exactly why his advice is worth having.
Because here’s the twist. The year he almost refused turned out to be one of the great experiences of his life.
Kevin joined the Boise Rotary Club around 1980, a young businessman looking to network. He says so plainly — for years Rotarians pretended networking wasn’t a real reason to join, but it was, and it still is. What kept him was the Foundation, and what changed him was the world. A grant sent him to teach in Mexico, where he ended up living with the president of the Rotary Club of Guadalajara and his family. They’re still close; last summer he brought his granddaughter to meet theirs. He learned Spanish. He made fifteen trips to Ecuador and helped build ten global grants, many of them piping clean water down mountainsides to villages that had never had it.
He served as governor of District 5400 in 2009 and 2010, and he drove roughly fifteen thousand miles to do it. A thirty-minute club visit in the far corner of the district could eat two days of windshield time. Kevin turned that into a feature rather than a bug. He asked to stay in members’ homes, meet their boards over dinner, sleep in the spare room, and show up for the noon meeting the next day. Some of his closest friendships were made on the long haul to Twin Falls — including one with Terry Gilbert, the governor who followed him, a man about as different from Kevin as you could design, who became a dear friend somewhere around the fourth trip across the state.
Ask Kevin what he’d do differently and he doesn’t reach for false modesty. He thought the sheer force of his personality from the podium would reverse the district’s membership slide. It didn’t. Nobody’s has, in twenty years. He wishes the big, comfortable, cash-rich clubs of his era had seen the demographic wave coming and started changing sooner. But he’s genuinely hopeful about what’s replacing the old model: evening clubs that meet once a month to do a service project and skip the rest, international e-clubs pulling in thirty members Rotary never would have reached, meetings trimmed from ninety minutes to sixty. The smaller, leaner clubs feel healthier now, he says, because the people in them chose service on purpose.
For the governor about to start, his one piece of advice is unglamorous and correct: be organized. By July 1 the train has left the station. The real work happens in the quiet years before, lining up the calendar and the people. And for struggling clubs, don’t take the president to the woodshed. They’re volunteers. They have jobs and kids and lives, and Rotary sits lower on their list than it does on yours. Support them. Encourage them. Help them see something bigger than themselves.
The thing he wishes the public understood isn’t the polio work or the grants. It’s the ethics — how seriously Rotarians everywhere take the Four-Way Test, recited in Spanish and Hausa and English at the close of meetings on the three continents he’s watched it happen with his own eyes.
I asked him for one word to describe his governor year. He didn’t hesitate. “Done.”
Then he laughed, and so did I. Because underneath that word was the other thing he told me, the thing nobody had warned him about going in: how much fun it would be.
Author Sean Spence has been a Rotarian since 1998; his father was a 20-year Rotarian; and his older brother was a District Governor. His goal is to preserve the history of our club’s District Governors and use them to provide an educational resource for future District Governors and all Rotarians.