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- [00:02]
Ken Jean
But my real passion is dragon boating and I got into the sport here in Stratford.
- [00:07]
Dan Cain
We have over 130 volunteers that pull off the event. Rotarians Family Network of Supporting friends. It's a community that brings this event together.
- [00:18]
Rotary Scholarship Recipient
So I remember my friends and I, we came down and we were at the river for two days helping people in and out of boats and being part of the Dragon Boat Festival. It was just such a fun time.
- [00:29]
Craig Thompson
We are ordinary people, but we can do extraordinary things because of the power of rotary and the connections we have.
- [00:37]
Ken Jean
What's really gratifying is the impact it's had on our community. Like a ripple effect.
- [00:48]
Jerome McDonnell
From Rotary magazine. This is the Rotary Voices podcast. I'm Jerome McDonnell. In 1996, club member Kevin McCann took a 2000-year-old Chinese tradition and turned it into a fundraising event. 37 teams participated in a dragon boat race on Lake Victoria. Stratford's been at it for 30 years now. It's raised well over a million dollars. How did something like a dragon boat race, that still takes some explaining in North America, become a successful strategy for the Stratford Rotary? Ripple Effect is a new documentary that tells the story of the development and impact of Stratford's Dragon Boat Festival. With me is the director of Ripple Effect, Craig Thompson. Good to meet you, Craig.
- [01:34]
Craig Thompson
Nice to meet you too, Jerome.
- [01:36]
Jerome McDonnell
And the president of the Stratford Rotary, Dan Cain. Good to meet you, Dan. For people who aren't familiar with Stratford, tell us a little bit about it.
- [01:44]
Dan Cain
Well, we're southwestern Ontario, so the city itself historically was a railroad town. It really came into its own when the CNR shops located here in 1905, 1906, that was the start of it. And because it was a railroad town, it also become a manufacturing town. So it was furniture and it was biscuits and things like that. And then as the railroad kind of came to an end, some forward thinking people had this crazy idea of starting a festival, a Shakespearean festival. And that became a thing in the mid-1950s that's still going strong.
- [02:17]
Jerome McDonnell
And I imagine Rotary has been there a long time.
- [02:19]
Dan Cain
Yeah, we had our hundredth anniversary a couple years ago. 1923 was when we started. So we have a lot of tradition. Everyone in town is touched by rotary.
- [02:28]
Jerome McDonnell
Well, okay, Dragon boat race, how did that happen? How did you guys decide? Well, here's something we want to do to engage the community.
- [02:38]
Dan Cain
So the Dragon Boat festival actually started off as a group of people that wanted to get canoeing going. And at the time, dragon boating was starting to come up in the world and they Thought this was a better mechanism to get things going. It became a dragon boat festival, and it became the fundraising thing. And it now has become the anchor of our fundraising every year.
- [02:59]
Jerome McDonnell
So, Craig, what does it look like when you see a dragon boat race? What happens there?
- [03:04]
Craig Thompson
Well, it's a real team sport. So each dragon boat has a dragon head on the front and a dragon tail at the back, brightly painted. And then there's somebody at the front keeping pace with a Chinese drum and an oarsman at the back. It's very much about team spirit and team building and everybody working in unison to cross the finish line. And it really harkens back, as you mentioned earlier, 2000 years. This was a ritual. It was part of their spiritual tradition in ancient China to honor the gods. And dragon boating at the time was part of the Chinese culture. And as the Chinese diaspora spread all over the world, they brought their traditions with them.
- [03:48]
Jerome McDonnell
And these races now happen across the world. I looked one up to see if they happen near my house, and there's one six miles away in the summer, every summer, people are doing dragon boat racing pretty frequently, pretty many places.
- [04:01]
Craig Thompson
That's right. And I think any place with water and community spirit, it's a great way of bringing people together. And it's no longer a Chinese tradition, although the Stratford Dragon Boat Festival was started by Kevin and Ken Jean. Now, Ken Jean's family has run a Chinese restaurant in stratford for over 50 years. So he was passionate about bringing something to Stratford that honored his Chinese heritage.
- [04:30]
Jerome McDonnell
And we actually have a clip here from the documentary of Ken Jean talking about the festival's origins. Here it is. For Dragon Boat Festival co founder Ken Jean, the awakening of the Dragon reinforces the connection with his Chinese heritage.
- [04:47]
Ken Jean
My father had immigrated from Hong Kong in the 1950s, and like a lot of immigrants, he went to work as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant here in Stratford. My mother served tables as well. Eventually, she said, why don't we start our own restaurant? Welcome to Jean's Restaurant. They opened Jean's on my eighth birthday back in 1970, and right away, they put me to work in the kitchen washing vegetables. That's where I learned what it meant to work hard to be part of a family business. The Dragon Boat Festival started with the idea of organizing a canoe club. I was into competitive canoe racing. Another paddler, Brian McNeil Smith, and I said, why don't we create a competition on the Avon River, a Dragon boat festival. It was part of my Chinese heritage and something for the community. The Rotary Club came on Board. And here we are, almost 30 years later. Yes, I run a restaurant, but my real passion is dragon boating.
- [05:48]
Jerome McDonnell
Tell me a little bit about what the day is like at the Dragon Boat Festival. Because it's more than just a race. There's all sorts of things that go on.
- [05:58]
Dan Cain
Dan, One of the great things about the Dragon Boat Festival is that we close off the street beside the river, so there's food trucks and there's people just walking. And I love what happens when you close streets. People just stop and mingle and you're talking to your neighbors. The other great thing about this event is, unlike some other dragon boat festivals, we are right beside the river and right beside the racing. So sometimes you're in a bigger river or you're in a lake or a body of water like that. So it's kind of hard to see and hear the individual racers and the drums and all that, because geographically we are so close to the race. It is an immersive experience. You're right there. You can hear the chants and the screams and the joy from the fourth boat out just as easily as you can from the first. And so the way that kind of the Dragon Boat Festivals go is there's a flurry of activity for one to three minutes, depending on the race that you're in. And then really not much happens for about five or six minutes as we stage the next boats and stuff like that. Well, at that point, the festival along the river just goes back to, you know, chatting with your neighbors and petting dogs and going and getting some ice cream and all the other great things that we build into this event.
- [07:09]
Jerome McDonnell
There's musicians and that type of thing.
- [07:11]
Dan Cain
Yeah, yeah. There's a couple of musicians that play throughout. There's a beer tent, and it becomes just this whole great thing where everybody just comes together.
- [07:21]
Jerome McDonnell
And Craig, how did you get involved in wanting to make a film about this Dragon Boat Festival? Why did you say to yourself, well, this is something for me. Tell us a little about yourself, your background and how you got into this.
- [07:32]
Craig Thompson
Well, I was raised in Stratford, and I actually got my start in the media world working for the local newspaper and radio and TV before heading off into the world. And about 30 years ago, I set up my own documentary production company, and we make films for Netflix and various other platforms like that. One of my most recent films was with William Shatner and Stephen Hawking called the Truth Is in the Stars, about where we'd be in Star Trek's era 250 years from now. But whenever I Look around me in my hometown, a documentary doesn't have to be a million dollars and reach a worldwide audience. And I found this story really, really intriguing. And also, my wife is Chinese, and we know a lot about Chinese culture. And Stratford, believe it or not, has a very large Chinese community, like a lot of places now. And I said, this is a really interesting story. And the fact that they've hit that $1 million and nobody really knows where the money goes and how much Rotary does to help other projects, I said, this is an amazing story, because when you talk to Rotarians, they're all very proud of the success of this event. And I think it's unique in its success that we thought, this is a really interesting story that should be told.
- [08:51]
Jerome McDonnell
How did you first hear about Rotary in Stratford?
- [08:54]
Craig Thompson
Rotary, as Dan mentioned, is everywhere. So in my youth, I played Rotary hockey in the Rotary hockey leagues and at one of the theaters in town. When I was young, the Rotary Club put on these travelogues. Travelogues used to be traveling filmmakers would go from city to city, back before the Internet and back before travel shows on television, and they would show movies from around the world. And that gave me the travel bug. And I said, I want to do that someday. So I've made films myself, and I've actually filmed on every continent in the world except for Antarctica. So I sort of trace back watching these exotic films that filmmakers would. There was a fellow in Michigan who always come up. I think he was one of the leading filmmakers of the travelogue series. So that inspired me. And, you know, personally, our family, sadly. But we benefited from the services of the Rotary hospice. So it's everywhere. And how could you not know about Rotary is sort of what. What I would say.
- [09:56]
Jerome McDonnell
And so the film, it's not really about racing. It's all about the impact that it makes in the community. And can you tell us about how that's evolved, Jan, and what kind of community projects you end up funding and how it's changed over the years?
- [10:11]
Dan Cain
Yeah. And back to that. Like, the idea started with the idea of being a film about Dragon boating, but then I think it was actually Craig's team that came up and said, no, actually, the story here is the ripples. It's everything that we do that we touch and we expand out from that spot. So we have things like the respite house, and we have hospice, and we have the Rotary arena. We have a great thing called the request committee. And what that does is for people that need small amounts of money, sometimes it's $150 for medical assistance, or it's a bedlift or something like that. So that's part of what we do as well. And with, with the money that we raise, sometimes we do little tiny projects that help somebody out and you go, oh, my goodness, I can't believe that $150 makes a huge difference in somebody's life. And then we pool together with Dragon Boat and with other fundraising things and are able to build respite houses and help with international work. And one of the projects that we talk about in the film is the Aquabox, which is our water filtration system that helps in disaster relief around the world. So it's not just going to one thing, it's going to everything that Rotary does, whether it's the Rotary Club of Stratford, whether it's District or Rotary International.
- [11:19]
Jerome McDonnell
Craig, were there people who you talked to in the film who struck you? Like, wow, this is exactly why I'm doing the film. This is a great service project. I'm really glad to share this with people.
- [11:29]
Craig Thompson
Well, what struck me most about the story is the commitment of the people who do all the community effort, the outreach from Rotary, who do it not to get attention, but to do it because they're passionate and they want to contribute. And I think the most visual one was the Aquabox program, where 40 or so people get together on a weekend morning and work together to build these aqua boxes. But there's dozens of events that we featured in the film where Rotary's impact is felt. But the most exciting part of the Dragon Boat Festival itself was not the Rotary members, but the participants from the community and abroad and beyond. Because the Dragon Boat Festival is not just for community teams. There are teams from Newfoundland, from across Ontario. People know about the Stratford Dragon Boat Festival, and they're not part of Rotary, but they love the sport of Dragon Boat and the spirit of community that it brings. So I think it's the enthusiasm and the passion of the people who just want to make a difference that really struck me.
- [12:35]
Jerome McDonnell
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in making the film? What was tough about it?
- [12:40]
Craig Thompson
Well, when most of the films that I do have a central character who goes on a quest or a journey to uncover something. So this one really didn't have a central character, but I put myself in the behind the camera central character where I as the filmmaker asked that question, you know, who cares about Rotary? What do they do in the world? And how does the Dragon Boat Festival contribute to community betterment? So the Challenge with this one is the Rotary Club does so many different things that aren't visual. Right. There's so many things that like Rotary exchange, what is there? You can't follow the people around the world. Rotary scholarships. The things that we had to work with were ice hockey, Rotary hockey. We had community dinners, we had the Dragon Boat Festival and various things like that. But the hardest part was stitching together all the different elements in a way that still kept the audience's interest without too many talking heads. So we're lucky we got the Dragon Boat footage, we got the Aquabox was a huge opportunity, patching together all of the impacts. And we didn't even cover all of the things Rotary did. We just, we had to make it in 30 minutes. So we only had a certain amount of time. We had to leave certain things on the cutting room floor.
- [14:00]
Jerome McDonnell
Well, I thought you did a nice job with the scholarships, which is a tough one. But you had a musical duo and you featured them and used their music at the end of the film, which was really good.
- [14:10]
Craig Thompson
Well, yeah, because how else do you do a story about scholarships? Yeah, I got a scholarship. Here it is. You have to demonstrate. And she was the perfect. And she also volunteers at the Dragon Boat Festival. So there's a little bit of a. But, yeah, that was the biggest challenge. It's a big wide ranging story and you want to stitch it all together in a nice package that people will really find engaging.
- [14:35]
Rotary Scholarship Recipient
I received the Rotary Scholarship when I was in grade 12. 1500 dollars per every year to go towards my university experience. So I was very grateful, especially since I knew from a young age that I wanted to pursue music in some capacity. So to have that scholarship was very helpful.
- [14:56]
Jerome McDonnell
Dan, I wanted to ask about helping vulnerable people in your community because the film did give me a feeling that then it was a priority for Rear Rotary Club. You were helping with hospice care, you were helping with mental health issues. And it seems like that was just a targeted effort and a very good thing.
- [15:15]
Dan Cain
Yeah, it's definitely one of the focuses that our club has is to help with mental health. We just re upped our commitment to the mental health unit of our, of our Stratford Hospital. And it kind of goes two ways. We, we start to help and then people come to us as the connection point to a lot of things. So when the discussion came up about doing a hospice a few years ago, we were told by the ministry that, yeah, you can get a hospice, but it's going to take you 10 years. And the Rotary Club of Stratford started and Then other people joined in, and together we had shovels in the ground within three years. And it was just the ability to have that connection to go through and knowing the right people to ask and all of that stuff. And then it becomes, go ask Rotary because they know the right people. And then it just becomes bigger and bigger. So when we're asked to do other things, then we already have the expertise to. To help and get these things moving on.
- [16:12]
Jerome McDonnell
So, Craig, how far do you think the film can go with teaching Rotarians about how to tell their own story?
- [16:20]
Craig Thompson
We're hoping it could be kind of an example of how other Rotary clubs can, as somebody said in the film, shout from the rooftops about the difference that they are making, especially at a time now when there are a lot more social issues and great needs both at home and around the world. But it's a common theme with every club in Rotary around the world. They're all doing something to give back. What is that story? How do you tell your story? Why should people care? And how do you simplify it for a general audience? Because there's several goals with a film like this. One is not just to raise awareness of Rotary's impact. It's to recruit new members. It's to develop partnerships and collaborations, and it's to show the world at large that we need service organizations. We can't just, you know, rely on government handouts and social programs. We have to contribute ourselves. And Rotary needs to remind the world at large the role it plays in that patchwork of social needs.
- [17:23]
Jerome McDonnell
Dan had people in town say, oh, this is what you're doing at Rotary. I mean, even people who slightly know what Rotary is would probably learn something about all the things that you can do in Rotary.
- [17:35]
Dan Cain
Absolutely. As we go forward, we're planning on using this as a tool for membership and for engagement and all of those things. And people know little bits and pieces of Rotary. This documentary that Craig has put together for us just does a fantastic job of tying that all together. So we go through and we talk about somebody who went on a youth exchange when they were in high school. And then we follow through a couple people as they've come back. And you know how that changed their experience. And we do such a great job in the community that we put our Rotary logo on everything. And sometimes maybe people just blow by it. And they know it as the Rotary complex, but they don't go and think, oh, that's the Rotary complex. You know, let's kind of take some credit for some of the things We've done and as Craig said, showed it from the rooftops a bit.
- [18:19]
Jerome McDonnell
You know, in North America, Rotary clubs have a little bit of a declining membership trend. How's that in Stratford? What kind of strategies do you have? How's it working for you?
- [18:31]
Dan Cain
So our club is a good size. We're sitting around 116 members right now. So that's a decent size, especially for a North American club. One of the things that we've taken advantage of came to us through Covid and we went to Zoom meetings like everyone else did, but afterwards we stuck with it. We rotate between purely Zoom every second week and then the off weeks we do a hybrid. So that has allowed us to reach out to younger members. It's allowed people that are still working to join into Rotary. We're a lunchtime club, so it's pretty hard for somebody who isn't self employed to be able to get that time off, come in, do lunch and go. We found a real uptake in younger members because they can just on their lunch hour at 12:01, jump into the meeting, enjoy the entire meeting, enjoy the fellowship, and then 1259 they can shut right off and then they're back at work. There's no commuting time or anything like that. So that's been something that we've really taken advantage of. And then it becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy where once you get a few younger members in, then a few younger members bring that extra energy. It revitalizes some of the members that have been with us a little bit longer and allows other people to go, hey, you can be 35 years old and join Rotary and contribute and come out and have fun.
- [19:42]
Jerome McDonnell
And I imagine the Dragon boat race is still a big draw for meeting people. And I understand the next one is September 19th.
- [19:51]
Craig Thompson
That's right.
- [19:51]
Jerome McDonnell
And you could maybe get a crew from say, Evanston if like Rotary headquarters wanted to put together 20 people, it's only a seven hour drive. They could just pop up and start rowing.
- [20:04]
Dan Cain
Yeah, have them come up a day or so ahead, they can do a couple training runs and away they go. Yeah.
- [20:08]
Jerome McDonnell
So everybody's invited. September 19th at Stratford, Ontario. Well, congratulations on all your work. Dan Kane is the president of the Stratford Rotary and Craig Thompson is the director of Ripple Effect. Thanks a lot. And it's been great talking with you both.
- [20:23]
Craig Thompson
Thanks for having us on the podcast, Jerome. It's been great, great talking to you.
- [20:27]
Dan Cain
Yeah, thank you, Jerome.
- [20:31]
JP Swenson
This episode of the Rotary Voices podcast was produced by JP Swenson and edited by Wen Huang. Jerome McDonnell was our host. Production by Yusu Kim. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us five stars on Alex Apple Podcasts and Spotify and share it with your friends. The Rotary Voices podcast is produced by Rotary Magazine, the official monthly publication of Rotary International. Thanks for listening.