One of our themes for the year has been to have projects that impact food insecurity. On that note, seven of our members and four spouses or friends worked at Second Harvest Food Bank on March 25. Second Harvest serves as a Food Bank that makes food available to Food Shelves around Minnesota. During our introduction to Second Harvest, the coordinator told us that One in Five Minnesotans face food insecurity on a daily basis! Other events that our club has participated in include Ralph Reeder Food Shelf, Every Meal, and Feed My Starving Children. On April 26, we will again be packing meals for Feed My Starving Children at Incarnation Church.
At our event on March 25, we sorted potatoes from 2000 lb containers into 40 lb bags that food shelves use to distribute potatoes to their clients. We also packed apples and oats. There were other groups, as well as our Rotary Club. Although, not glamorous work, participants get the feeling that they are doing important work in the fight against hunger. After two hours, we had packed over 17,000 lbs of food and, in Second Harvest’s calculations, that equates to 16,203 meals! Definitely something to be proud of. Take a look at the pictures below to see some of the happy members and other helpers.
Today's speaker was Tascha Just, a new member of the Mounds View School Board. Tascha is a Minnesota-based school psychologist and the founder of SEL Academy, where she helps schools and communities build trauma-responsive and neurodiversity-affirming systems. She is president of the MN School Psychologists Association and an appointee to Minnesota's Children's Justice Ace Task Force. She grew up in a military family and describes herself as neurodivergent, having had a number of concussions and brain injuries. Her primary focus is to help foster resilience in students.
Today's speaker was Tea Rozmann who leads a local organization known as "Green Card Voices", a Minneapolis based, nationally growing non profit that connects immigrants and their communities through multimedia storytelling. They record the first person narratives of immigrants, and publish them in books, online and in traveling exhibits. So far they have recorded the stories of over 500 immigrants and refugees who are originally from over 140 countries and who now reside in Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, California, North Dakota, Georgia and Wisconsin. Ms. Rozmann emigrated to the U.S. from Slovenia. Their perspective is one that views immigration as being most successful when it is approached as a "potluck" vs. a "melting pot" - meaning that preserving and sharing aspects of the culture of their home countries is better for all than expecting all to become fully homogeneous. Currently, about 15% of the U.S. population is foreign born.
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