For the second year in a row, the Club was conferred the highest honors at the district yearend awards—Most Outstanding Club-Overall and, for Pres. Isidro “Sid” Garcia, Most Outstanding Club President-Overall.
It was a banner year in International Service. The Club applied for two matching grants totaling $80,000 from The Rotary Foundation— for the Makati Service Cooperative, which offered skills training and gainful employment to Makati residents; and the National Resource Center for the Handicapped, a facility physically connected to the Stepping Stone Learning Center that offered information and assistance on physical, mental and psychological handicaps to students, teachers and parents.
The Club also hosted two inbound Group Study Exchange Teams, one from D-5100 in Oregon, USA, the other from D-9450 in Western Australia, enlisted 24 Paul Harris Fellows, and contributed $10,000 for two matching grant projects to Sister Club RC Kuala Lumpur Diraja of Malaysia as an international project partner.
The worsening traffic situation in Metro Manila, the Makati Central Business District in particular, called for the Club to assemble a Metro Manila Traffic Forum among stakeholders for a spirited discussion of the situation and what can be done about it in terms of infrastructure, systems, rules and ordinances. The forum led to the revival of the Blue Zone Traffic Management Project that assigned loading and unloading points, one-way and two-way streets, and pedestrian crossing points, deployed more traffic enforcers, and put in place other measures to ease the flow of vehicular and human traffic in the metro.
Launched during the year was a project that runs to this day—Bantay Bata. A brainchild of lawyer Frank Chavez, the project initially ran on a seed fund of P250,000 secured from PagCor by Frank, who chaired the project until his passing in 2013. Implemented jointly with the Makati Social Welfare Department, it is credited with establishing the Barangay Council for the Protection of Children in Makati and Bantay Bata desks in barangay halls and police stations in the city. It also conducts seminars and workshops on various aspects of child abuse and child protection for barangay volunteers and social workers, seminars on responsible parenting for parents, and out-of-town camps and social activities, as well as counseling and spiritual retreats for victims of child abuse and neglect.
The year set yet another record in the ways and means department by netting P1.6 million in revenues from the Christmas Bazaar.