News from across District 9350

On 9 August we thank all the women in Rotary who brighten their communities and inspire lasting change.

Across District 9350 women lead clubs, run projects and carry the work of service into places it would not otherwise reach. Today we celebrate them.

The Rotary Club of Stellenbosch and Spier Wine Farm are sending a flotilla of rubber ducks down the Eerste River on Saturday 19 September, and every cent raised goes to the Gender Based Violence Centre in Stellenbosch.

R2 500 adopts a duck and dresses it in your company colours. Racing starts at 10h00 at Spier. It is team building, networking and marketing in one morning on the water — for a cause that needs the district behind it.

To enter, contact Simon on 063 968 6735 or spmills62@gmail.com.

The Rotary Club of Wynberg hosts its Quiz Night on Friday 20 November 2026 at Timour Hall Villa Estate, Plumstead, from 18h00.

Tables of up to eight, R120 per person. Proceeds go to NSRI Station 16, Strandfontein, whose volunteers keep our beaches safe through the festive season and summer.

RSVP by 13 November to rotaryquizct@gmail.com. Book early — tables fill up fast.

“At 6:30 this morning, Nomsa carried 40 litres of water home before her children left for school.”

That sentence, and the reason it works, sat at the centre of a district Public Image session on ethical storytelling in the age of AI, presented by Sarah van Heerden.

The argument is blunt. AI is not making organisations sound alike — people are. A model learns patterns, so when every club types the same instruction, “write a Facebook post about…”, every club gets the same paragraph back. The sameness is not in the software. It arrives when nobody does the thinking first.

Set Nomsa against the opening most of us have already written: “Today we celebrated another incredible milestone as our amazing volunteers came together…” Everyone has seen it. Nobody remembers it. The difference is not vocabulary. It is that somebody was there, watched what happened, and wrote down the part that was true.

Four questions, then the tool

Before opening an AI tool at all, the session put four questions on the table: What happened? Why does it matter? Who changed? Why should anyone care? Great prompts cannot rescue poor thinking — answer those four badly and no amount of instruction will save the result.

Where AI does earn its place is in the shaping. A prompt that sets a word count, bans the tired phrases, demands an opening line that cannot be skipped and asks for a closing question produces something usable, because a person decided all of that.

The part that does not transfer

If AI invents something, the software is not accountable. The organisation is. The writer is. The communicator is. That responsibility never moves, which is why the five rules from the session start with never publishing what you cannot verify, and why the second is simply that AI cannot witness. It was not at the handover. It did not meet Nomsa.

There is a practical half too: stop writing everything everywhere. A magazine article carries the whole story in 350 to 450 words. Facebook gets the first paragraph and no more than 200. The website carries the rest. People stop reading because we ask them to read 800 words in the wrong place.

The three working guides from the session are now in the knowledge base: the thinking that comes first, the five rules, and writing for the channel.

AI can predict words. Only people can recognise what is true. So the question the session leaves every club with is a plain one: when somebody reads your next post, will they be able to tell it was your club that wrote it?

The pictures featured in the 2026 Rotary magazine photo awards reflect the extraordinary ordinary