Everyone is needed during the next 3 weeks to help with the Taste of the Hops at Snail Lake Regional Park on Friday night, August 18. The committee has done a great job in setting up this first-time event and now all of us need to pitch in to sell tickets, bring our friends and relatives and volunteer as needed the day of the event.
Please be creative in finding people to purchase tickets and inviting people to attend with tickets that you may purchase for them. If you cannot make the sale in person, refer your friends to https://www.tasteofthehops.com/. Finally, voluntary donations to the Rotary Healthy Youth Foundation are always welcome.
Throughout August, we are continuing to have great program topics at weekly meetings. This happens thanks to the fresh ideas of members who share the responsibility to invite speakers. The list of future speakers in this Bulletin shows that variety of community leaders and informative topics.
Our club's major fundraiser is less than three weeks away. Things are falling in place, but we must be more aggressive in selling tickets. We have a great web-site, www.tasteofthehops.com. You can buy tickets on the site. Please send the web-site address to your friends and family. Let's make the "Taste of the Hops" a great event that people will look forward to attending.
While our BINGO is one of our fund-raising activities, being a notable part of the Slice of Shoreview is being an active member of our community. As usual, Ken Hola brought the whole thing together, and with the help of all us “Certified BINGO Technicians,” raised nearly $1700. The pizazz Ken adds, talking up the extra prizes in addition to the cash, has become a Slice staple. When one of the technicians temporarily took over announcing for a game and only offered a cash prize, he was immediately challenged for an “extra.” The top “extra”? – SPAM! And the east popular? – Bacon band-aids.
As they say in Sweden, “Tusen tak” - - A thousand thanks, Ken!
With no meeting on July 4th, today's meeting marked the transition to a new Rotary year. Peggy Strom opened the meeting with a review of highlights from 2016-2017. Our most notable accomplishment this year was the addition of 7 new members - a 30% increase from our starting point of 23 members at the beginning of the Rotary year. Other notable highlights were the many activities involved in supporting our inbound exchange student from South Korea, the matching grant we made to the new Ramsey County Library and the work undertaken to plan a brand new fund-raising event coming up on August 18th. On a global level, we continued our important support for the Rotary Foundation and Polio Plus. Closer to home we had important community service activities such as granting a $2,500 STRIVE scholarship at MV High School, serving dinner at the Ronald McDonald House at Childrens Hospital in Minneapolis, packing meals for "Feed My Starving Children" and Salvation Army bell ringing during the holiday season. Incoming president Kent Peterson went on to share his vision for the Rotary year just beginning. His thoughts are captured well in the "President's Corner" section of this newsletter. The club thanked Peggy for her service and welcomed Kent and his leadership for the upcoming year!
The club welcomed visiting Rotarian Valde Steffenson from the St. Paul Club. Valde was at the meeting to give a brief review of how the Rotary District Grant Committee operates. He noted that grant formula was recently reworked in an effort to better reward the clubs that donate to Rotary International. He noted that 22 grants had been awarded the past year. He talked specifically about a Club project that ships medical supplies to Bolivia, which is the 2nd poorest nation in the western hemisphere. He noted that about 30% of the supplies were given to rural clinics that were very much in need and that about 70% of the supplies were given to hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities. They have provided nearly 3.5 million pounds of medical supplies and around 2000 wheel chairs.
New Club member Betty Ziskovsky then gave a classification talk. She noted that she was born in Omaha, Nebraska and was one of six children. Both of her parents were dentists. She met her husband Joe in college and they have four children (2 boys and 2 girls - proving again that Terry can add). Joe went to work for Texas Instruments and Betty indicated that she was actively involved in various community service activities in the Austin, Texas area. She moved to Minnesota many years ago and was again involved in many volunteer activities including Shoreview's first sister city organization. She went back to school and earned her teaching degree and was a teacher for a while. As an avid gardener, she is now earning her Masters of Horticultural services degree. She has a beautiful backyard garden that you can see off of Tanglewood Drive (I said this, Betty didn't) and she also noted that she and Joe love to travel.
Crystal Olson from Target, Inc.'s Human Resources department was in attendance today. She manages community affairs for the Shoreview Target location and wanted to reach out to our group to look for ways in which we might partner together in community service - certainly a good contact for us to maintain. Our speaker was Femina Ajayi-Hackworth from the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Femina serves as Diversity and Inclusion Director for the Corrections Department and is focused on ensuring the hiring of a diverse workforce. She provides training for the recruitment of ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, females, etc. The goal is not necessarily to match the make-up of the prison population, but rather to match Minnesota's population. Her presentation included information on the ten correctional facilities we have in this state. There are multiple levels, ranging from several minimum security locations to our only maximum security location in Oak Park Heights. The Faribault facility is Minnesota's largest, with 2,000 offenders. Faribault includes MINNCOR industries, which trains inmates to produce wood and cleaning products for public sale. Faribualt also partners with "Can Do Canines" which allows inmates to train service dogs. The Lino Lakes location has a faith-based initiative operated by prison fellowship. Lino Lakes also provides a work-release program, which the City of Shoreview has utilized quite successfully. This program has provided workers for city maintenance crews, which have proven to work well and at a fraction of the cost of "regular" workers.
.jpg?_=636371442625302793)
)
Our club's major fundraiser is less than three weeks away. Things are falling in place, but we must be more aggressive in selling tickets. We have a great web-site, www.tasteofthehops.com. You can buy tickets on the site. Please send the web-site address to your friends and family. Let's make the "Taste of the Hops" a great event that people will look forward to attending..jpg)
.jpeg?_=636371442625302793)
.JPG)
The club welcomed visiting Rotarian Valde Steffenson from the St. Paul Club. Valde was at the meeting to give a brief review of how the Rotary District Grant Committee operates. He noted that grant formula was recently reworked in an effort to better reward the clubs that donate to Rotary International. He noted that 22 grants had been awarded the past year. He talked specifically about a Club project that ships medical supplies to Bolivia, which is the 2nd poorest nation in the western hemisphere. He noted that about 30% of the supplies were given to rural clinics that were very much in need and that about 70% of the supplies were given to hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities. They have provided nearly 3.5 million pounds of medical supplies and around 2000 wheel chairs.