Richard Hart the newly elected President of the Whitley Bay Rotary Club has recently been outlining his theme for the coming year - ‘Moving With the Times’.

2013 is memorable one for all club members at the Rotary Club, as it is the 90th anniversary. When Philip Seager formed the club on 31st July 1923, one of its aims was to contribute to the life of the community.

Richard said, ‘I am honoured to be the President in this celebration year, when I shall maintain our links in the community, which were established all those years ago’.

We have marked the start of the year by planting ninety trees on the Earsdon Bypass ( now named Rotary Way ).

We have also visited the nine First Schools in our town, where we have presented each 4th year school leavers ( 480 in all ) with a special edition of the Usborne Illustrated Dictionary for Life. We hope that the dictionary will help them on the next step of their educational journey.

In the future of course, we will be supporting our usual activities. These include the St Nicholas Fair, Fireworks Display on the Links and our ‘Santa in The Mall’ and Christmas tree activities in the town centre in December etc.

We have in the past, and with help from donations raised in our community, always tried to support our local charities, including the Disability Forum in Shiremoor, Tynemouth Mencap, North East Children’s Rainbow Trust, North East Tiny Lives and St Oswald’s Children’s Hospice etc. In addition to this, we will continue to support national charities, particularly those that mean so much too many of us, Macmillan Cancer Support being one.

As my theme for the year is, ’Moving With The Times’ the club will shortly be creating and running its first web site. We hope people will ‘log on’ to see where and what we have been doing in our community and how we have supported good causes further a field in the third world.

We hope that people will use the site to contact us, to see if we can help them and in particular, to find out a little bit about us as we continue to make a positive contribution to our town.