Berwick Springs VIEW Club

The Club’s new year started with the Annual Chicken and Champagne luncheon hosted by the committee. It has been a popular event and is a good way to start off the New Year before the regular meetings commence.

On 3rd February, it will be the Club's AGM followed by a lunch at The Berwick Springs Hotel.

Upcoming meetings on the 3rd of March and the 7th of April will have the members enjoying a talk by a retired Policeman (in March), and a follow-up talk from My Aged Care (in April) regarding to the changes that are coming.

We have been very lucky to have been selected and offered an opportunity by Summerset Retirement Village in Cranbourne Nth. Summerset has offered us a sponsorship arrangement, which meant they would give our Club funds to apply for three more Learning for Life students!

The students will still be sponsored under the umbrella of our VIEW Club. In exchange Summerset were given time to speak to our Members about their retirement villages. Word of mouth will also be invaluable for this arrangement.

Everything is in readiness for our club Christmas luncheon on Monday the 2nd December at the Berwick Springs Hotel.

The committee has spent the day packaging up a lot of Christmas Hampers to add to the excitement of the day, all goods donated by our members.

The New Year brings our annual Chicken and Champagne luncheon on the 20th January.

This will be our first fundraiser for 2025 and is always eagerly looked forward to.

Today we enjoyed a side benefit of our new sponsors Summerset Retirement Villages.

They hosted our ladies at a High Tea in their temporary clubhouse, as construction is still ongoing.

All money paid came back to our club as donations for our students so was a fabulous money raiser for us.

They are covering the cost of an extra three students for our club, which I believe takes us up to 13 students.

Guess who’s turning 21! October is a celebration of our 21st birthday. Dress to impress, and come enjoy the fun. Lots of Raffle prizes to be won. 

One of our Members, Dorelle, will be giving us an entertaining talk on her time as an Air Hostess. This promises to be very entertaining, and will probably go right back to the Ansett and TAA days.  Am very much looking forward to it.

Program for June, July and August is below:

June, Neil Lucas is going to speak on the history of Berwick Street names.  Feedback from Members that have heard this say that it is extremely interesting. 

July has Helen from Quilts of Valour speaking on their organisation, and hopefully showing us some of the amazing work done.  The aim of this charity is to award quilts to Veterans, Service Personnel of the Australian Defence Force and our Allies as well as immediate family.

August has Jane Ting, a children's author, giving us a talk on recycling and how to introduce young children to this concept.
 

One of our main fundraisers for the year was held in May and yet again, our Members were exceptionally generous, both with the boxes of goods donated and the bids for the contents, unsighted. This has proved to be a great fundraiser for our club, and has gone a long way to funding one of our students, who has now decided to continue on into tertiary education. 

Our year has started well, with a large group of our Members enjoying our Chicken and Champagne day, which is one of our biggest fund-raisers for the year.   We now are moving into our regular lunch meetings, which are on the first Monday of every month except for Easter, which will be on the 8th April due to  the Easter holidays. 

For our March meeting, we will be having a talk by Casey Olori from Australian Unity, who will be giving us a talk on Aged Care Packages and Home Care.  As this is our last meeting before Easter, we will also be having our Easter Egg raffles, which are always looked forward to, and again, as the eggs are all donated, proceeds of our raffles are another good fundraiser for the year. 

April at this point we are still awaiting confirmation, but both the speakers under consideration are a little different and will be extremely interesting.   

In May, we will be having our Annual Box Auction, which is another of our major fundraisers for the year.  This involves our Members bringing a box/boxes to the value of approx $20, which our Members then bid on as in an Auction, contents unseen.  This is a lot of fun, and all the proceeds of this go to our Learning for Life Students, of which we currently have nine, with the likely prospect of obtaining a tenth student early this year.'

October saw our club celebrate its 20th birthday, which was an outstanding success.  We had over 70 people attend, including Members of our club and Members of some of our neighbouring VIEW Clubs.  Our theme for the day was flowers and to help that along we were lucky enough to have James Wall from Garden World as our guest speaker.  He also donated some plants as spot prizes on our tables and is a very engaging and informative speaker, who was enjoyed by all.  Members dressed in the spirit of the day with bright floral outfits and some homemade floral hats in some instances