+ Reveals Her Plans For WOMEN & CHILDREN
Dr. Olasankunmi Esther Sam-Amoye is a Rotarian, experienced Human Resources Consultant, HR with a demonstrated history of working in management consulting, banking, insurance, and non-profit industries. She is skilled in negotiation, Networking, Relationship Management, Team Building, Talent Management, Policy Design and Development, Competency Design, and Organisational Development Expert.
She has a Master of Arts (M.A) from the University of Lagos with certifications globally. She has also taken several HR courses and attended conferences locally and internationally. Her passion lies in her immediate environment, and where the situation permits, across boundaries of lives and professions.
Dr. Sam-Amoye is a prominent speaker, coach, humanitarian, transformational trainer, and a prolific writer.
A few days back, City People Journalist, BENPRINCE EZEH (08068599879) had a chat with her on plans for women and children in Akowonjo. Below is the excerpt from the chat.
Can you tell us about your journey to being on Rotarian?
In becoming a part of Rotary, I just stumbled on it when I was in secondary school and I saw a lot of people having fun, making merry, and also making money for charity I asked and I discovered that it was the secondary school arm of Rotary which is called interact and they were about to chatter it in my secondary school then, new era girls secondary school. So I joined them and began to raise funds at that level and began doing small projects for the school, sign boards, signage, and sometimes cleaning gutters of the areas, and that was how I started. From then, which was in the 90s, it has been a forward-looking thought for me, after I left secondary school I joined Rotaract at the community level and even when I entered Unilag I still joined another Rotaract, and when I finished my NYSC I joined a rotary club. Because of marriage, I left, and later when I started having my kids and I was comfortable again to go back, I joined another rotary club so the rotary club is a part of me, why? Because it focused on humanity and humanity is about you and I, humanity is about my neighbor, humanity is about the next man, woman, child, how can we better our lives beyond what the government can do all the time across the world, governments are strained with all the needs they have to meet, but how can we individually with whom God has blessed either with time or financially, with the knowledge or with skills to come together to use what we know and have to elevate the sufferings, to promote the wellbeing of the members of my society because the members of my society are my wellbeing as well. So that is why I decided to stay in Rotary to the point when I’m ready to serve as a president of the club which is a high calling indeed.
How did you become the president of Rotary?
I would start by saying that Akowonjo is one of the big clubs in Rotary District 9110, Akowonjo is 38yrs old and has produced district governors, Akowonjo has produced several past assistant governors, and a lot of prominent dignitaries either at the national or state level, so Akowonjo is a powerful rotary club, I think I am the 4th female presiding it’s 38yrs of existence so you can imagine.
However, Akowonjo has also involved the matured and embraced change, Akowonjo welcomes progressiveness, Akowonjo welcomes innovation, so based on my experience in the consulting world, I think I signified my interest to serve and bring all that knowledge to the club and after due consideration and election (election usually starts like 2 years before, so I was president-elect last year, I was president nominee the year before) so as I am president now we have the person who is going to take over from me, we have the person who is going to take over that person who is on queue, so I’ve been on queue for two years in training to become president of the club
What are the promises you made on your way to becoming the president, to the community?
One of the key things for me as a female president was I would focus on mothers and children and the first thing we did in July, which is the theme for Rotary is to focus on maternal health and children’s health. We did that for the women and also you see what we’re doing here is also for breast cancer screening, have we done other things in the year? Yes, but we’re doing things for families, and the family consists of men, women, and children but with a special focus of attention on women. One of the things I’ve also done this year is to do an empowerment program focused on women so we did training for them on how to make soap and cream and how to do makeup so that they can make money from it. We also now did empowerment packages for them to start up their business and at that event, we had almost 90 women or a hundred that we empowered to go one, so those are the kind of things that I promised and I’m living up to by the grace of God and the support of my members of course
What are the difficulties you’ve encountered since becoming president?
One of the things I would say is raising funds, getting the funds to do these projects is one of the major issues that I’ve encountered, but then again, I work with people who are committed to the vision of Rotary so we keep going out, or we keep coming inward to get money ourselves to na able to do these projects, that’s financial.
The other issue or challenge I’ve also had is community support, because for Rotary one of the things we need is support, and when I say support it’s not just money, support in telling people about our programs, support in getting people to be aware of the benefits, support in getting people to know that polio for instance isn’t going to kill you, so that kind of awareness is one of the challenges we’ve had.
The third one I would like to mention is public awareness to the press, a lot of things we’ve done in terms of pushing our activities out there have been funded by the club, and we would like for organizations in the media to partner with us so it helps us air some of these things because we are also contributing to the society. So I think those are the major areas I would like to talk about in terms of the challenges of being a President.
What are the pieces of advice you would give to the upcoming Rotarians?
The critical advice I would like to give is for there to be vision and direction for any leader because some of the times things will not go the way you had planned, but if you have a vision that you agreed on or signed up for, then as a president you can keep going at it. So every leader should ensure that they have the club vision and they have the personal vision aligned with that club vision that they are pursuing all the time
The second thing I would like to say is that people should be emotionally intelligent because in being a president you deal with different people internally and externally, so we need to be very emotionally intelligent, understand where people are, understand what their doing, their businesses, how it affects them so you don’t get frustrated when people are not available.
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