Club Rotarian, John Borst provided a brief updated vocational as part of President Ed’s "Spotlight" Program. Although the idea was to speak for only 3 minutes, in the absence of the planned speaker, Borst was encouraged by the chair, to speak a little longer. 
Borst joined Rotary in December of 2009 at the invitation of Peter Keen. He loves to talk, so he described how his voice, whether in auditory or written form, gets him into predicaments.
 
For example, in 2010 he inquired of your editor if the club had a website and when he found we did not, he investigated ClubRunner. After spending 24 hours he developed a club website and the Executive approved its purchase.
 
That same year, he was assigned to chair the club “Foundation” committee. This took him to a district meeting to be trained. At that meeting, he told the District Governor that some clubs had poor websites. This lead to the editor of the district website asking him for assistance to update the district website and shortly thereafter being in charge of that website too.
 
This, in turn, inspired him to start the 5550opinions blog where he could write editorials about Rotary. He would post these on LinkedIn where Rotary International had a discussion group of over 65,000 members.
 
The first post to get him some notoriety was one stating that we should elect a woman as president in honor of the 25th anniversary of women being admitted to Rotary. This resulted in over 1800 comments and 14 Rotarians from across the World, writing a paper to be presented by a club to the RI Board of Directors.
 
Borst believes it had a direct influence on the appointment of the first female vice-president and the first female member of the Presidential Selection committee shortly thereafter.
 
In another post after the new Rotary logo was announced he suggested to Rotary they should be using the Rotary logo design for all sub-organizations by putting the name of groups like Rotaract and Interact beside the logo, a suggestion RI actually implemented.
 
But It was Post 197 that got him into real trouble.  During the 2016 American election, he wrote a fictitious story about Trump applying for Rotary membership in a club and being turned down.  After the election, he wrote another on the implications of Trump’s election for the organization. This led to people contacting the District 5550 DG. When he was asked to withdraw the post he stopped posting to 5550opinions and began posting at his private Wethe4 blog.
 
Ironically, his most read article occurred this spring: It was entitled  ROTARY LIVES UP TO ITS PRINCIPLES WITH NEW BYLAW 2.100 AND BREAKS ‘THE SOUND OF SILENCE’ It has been viewed over 1700 times.  
 
Borst served as club President in 2013-14.