Why our club started a book club for young professionals

At Rotary Mihan we have spent the last few years trying to broaden who walks through the door. Our chapter has long been built around people in established careers, often close to retirement age, who already know exactly how a Rotary meeting runs. That structure works, but it can also leave gaps. When we surveyed our members in 2024, only 11 per cent were under 35, and almost half of those were aged 30 to 35. We wanted to change that without lowering the standards that make Rotary what it is.

The reading group was a low-risk way to test the idea. Books are portable, conversation is cheap, and a once-a-month commitment fits around long working weeks in cities like Melbourne and Sydney where commutes eat up time. What started as a small WhatsApp thread of seven members has now run continuously for eleven months. The story of how it grew, and why we think the model suits a Rotary setting, is worth telling.

A gap we kept noticing at our Rotary club

For most of our existence, our meetings felt predictable. The same faces, similar professions, the same friendly disagreements about board reports. Younger members would join, attend the induction barbecue, and then quietly slip away within a year. We had heard the same story at the district level when we attended gatherings hosted by partners such as the Rotary Club of North Sydney, who shared their own struggle to keep members in their thirties engaged.

The problem was not apathy. It was relevance. Young professionals are busy, often commuting from suburbs like Parramatta or Penrith into the city centre, carrying the cost of living pressures that have become background noise in Australian media. They also tend to read more than we expected, especially non-fiction tied to their work. We had tried themed cocktail nights, trivia, and networking breakfasts in Haymarket. Most flopped after the second event because they lacked substance.

The book club changed that by centring conversation rather than refreshments. Members who had been quiet at weekly Rotary lunches were suddenly leading discussion about a chapter they had read on the train from Gosford or the tram from Caulfield. Suddenly we had a reason to stay in touch between meetings that did not feel like networking.

The kind of professionals we wanted to draw in

We were not trying to reach everyone under 40. The pitch was aimed at people in their late twenties to mid-thirties who already had some kind of leadership exposure, whether that meant running a small team, owning a tradie business in outer suburban Brisbane, or working in policy somewhere in Canberra. The demographic lines up with what the Australian Bureau of Statistics describes as the most economically active cohort, the group most likely to be looking for meaning alongside income.

Many of the members who joined our reading group had not grown up with Rotary at all. One had moved from Brisbane five years earlier for work in tech-adjacent logistics, another was a junior doctor navigating AHPRA registration and the long hours that come with it. They had no family links to Rotary, but they had a strong sense that professional success should translate into something useful for their suburb, their street, or their kids' school.

That mix matters more than we realised. When we host a book on leadership, the conversation between a GP, a civil engineer working on WestConnex-style infrastructure projects, and a small-business owner in Parramatta is genuinely different from the one we used to have at our board table.

How the book club actually runs each month

The format is deliberately low-friction. We pick a book about six weeks in advance and announce it in our newsletter. The reading schedule and recent reader milestones are tracked on the awards page inside our member portal, alongside the calendar entry for the meeting, so people can plan around it. Most titles are around 250 pages and come from business, biography, or civic history, not fiction.

Every third meeting we invite an external speaker for an hour-long Q&A tied to the book. In January we hosted an author who wrote about small-town volunteering in regional Victoria, and the room was full. We have kept the cover charge at zero for members because the value is meant to be in attendance, not fundraising, and that aligns with how Rotary clubs across Australia typically price community events.

We meet in person in a hired room in Parramatta on the last Wednesday of each month, with a hybrid option for regional members and parents whose kids are in after-school care. Notes from each session are shared in our member portal alongside a small digital library of past titles, so anyone who missed a month can catch up before the next discussion.

What members are getting out of it

The most honest benefit is friendships that bleed into other parts of club life. Two of our newer members, who met through the book club, now co-chair a literacy tutoring program we run with a local primary school in western Sydney. That kind of crossover used to take a year of weekly meetings. Now it happens after two novels and a coffee at the Westfield on a Saturday morning.

There is also a quieter benefit around retention. Australian retention numbers for Rotary clubs in the 25 to 44 bracket have been stubborn for years, but our branch has held steady at around 78 per cent annual retention since the book club started, up from 61 per cent the year before. We are not claiming causation, only correlation.

In our members' own words, the reading group helps them think more carefully about the projects they put their hand up for. A recent title on community organising reshaped how our next blood drive is being co-ordinated with Red Cross Lifeblood, and another on housing policy fed directly into a submission we made to a state government inquiry in Adelaide. That is precisely the kind of cross-pollination we hoped for.

Where this fits inside our wider community work

Rotary is not a book club, and we have no interest in pretending otherwise. The reading group is a feeder, not a destination. Members who join us through the book discussions tend to step into service projects faster than the historical average, and they often gravitate toward ones that match the themes we have been reading about.

The food packaging event we ran late last month, summarised in our short food packaging recap, drew four of its five coordinators from the reading group. Two of them had never volunteered on a hands-on service project before. That is the kind of conversion a chapter like ours has been chasing for a decade.

We have begun sharing our format notes with sister clubs in the wider Rotary network, including a Vietnamese partner group whose reading initiative is documented at their community library portal, so other districts can adapt the model rather than reinvent it. The aim is not to copy our specific reading list. It is to give younger professionals a reason to walk into a Rotary meeting that does not feel like an obligation tied to a parent's generation. Members who want to back the broader community projects, from the food packaging drive to the tutoring program, can make a contribution through the same portal.

Conditions we set up front to keep things useful

• We cap attendance at 20 people per meeting to keep discussion open, and we keep a small waitlist that often clears within two months.
• Titles are chosen by a rotating committee of three members rather than by the board, so the reading list reflects the room, not the hierarchy.
• We never pair a meeting with a fundraising appeal. Books come first, asks come later, if at all.
• We commit to publishing discussion notes inside the member portal with no paywall, because a reading group that hides its thinking loses the point.
• We treat the format as a draft, not a finished product, and we change it the moment a meeting feels stale.

The next reading session is on the last Wednesday of the month at our usual Parramatta room, and a handful of guest seats are released seven days beforehand through the member portal. The current book title, the room access code, and a short guest sign-up form are all posted in the same place the morning those seats open.