A new Rotary year has begun and it promises to be an interesting one! We are sponsoring both an outbound exchange student - Michaela Allen who will be spending the school year in Turkey, and an inbound exchange student - Jiui Youn who will arriving next month from South Korea. It has been a few years since our club has been involved in Rotary's student exchange program so we'll be learning all over again but it is a great opportunity, given our club's focus on healthy youth activities. We have also made the decision to plan for a new and different club fundraiser in place of the Rockin' Rotary Variety Show we've held for the past 3 years. Many thanks to the committee that has begun planning for this event to be held next August. Another new activity is the work underway to obtain a Rotary Foundation grant to fund material for the new Ramsey County Library that is under construction in Shoreview. This year's Rotary International President is John Germ from Tennessee. He has chosen the theme "Rotary Serving Humanity" to represent his goals for the year. Our plans tie in well and I am excited to step into the role of club president during this time of new challenges and activities. I look forward to partnering with all of you on this important work!
I would like to also take this opportunity to thank outgoing president Ken Hola for his outstanding leadership over the past twelve months. Ken's boundless energy and selfless commitment to Rotary are inspiring and a huge asset to this club. You will be a hard act to follow, Ken!
This year's Slice of Shoreview is on Friday, July 22, until Sunday the 24th. As our new president, Peggy Strom, reported at our last meeting, the only fundraiser this budget year is the Bingo we put on at the Slice. We need to make it the mist profitable ever so ask everyone you know to play Rotary Bingo. You never know - they may win a can of Spam.
As mentioned before, the District had more grant requests than monies available. After everyone made their oral presentations, the committee decided to fund all at lower levels, so our $2865 for the pre-school literacy items in the new Shoreview Library was reduced to $2035. Even this amount is subject to approval by Rotary International – about a month out.
The Club welcomed visiting Rotarian Bill Nielson from the St. Paul club. The guest speaker was Marvin Simms, who serves as Equity Coordinator for the Mounds View School District.
Marvin discussed the success of the STRIPES (Students Together Respecting the Importance and Purpose of Education in Schools) program that is offered at Irondale High School and both Highview and Edgewood Middle Schools. During the past school year about 95 students participated in the program. The High School program, which has been operating for several years, had 42 students in the program. The 42 students include 13 high school seniors that are now continuing on to a post secondary education. The program assists students who often have a gap in their learning and need additional assistance to stay focused on academics.Marvin hopes to expand the program to the elementary school level next year. He explained that one of the activities of the STRIPES program is attending a camp in Loretto, Minnesota. The camp serves as a team building exercise for the students and stretches them from both a mental and physical standpoint. The participants in the program take a pledge to do what it takes to be successful in school. This year, they also went on a college visit to St. Cloud State University so that many of the students could envision themselves in a college atmosphere.
We were pleased to welcome a number of guests today, including our outbound exchange student Mikaela Allen and her mother. Mikaela will be leaving for Turkey in August. She seems well prepared and excited to begin this adventure. She has prepared a brief presentation about herself that she will use when being introduced in her new homeland and she previewed this for us. It includes trying to explain the concept of "Minnesota Nice"! We look forward to tracking Mikaela's progress and welcoming her back next summer. Our primary program for the meeting was provided by Dr. Karen McKinney. Dr. McKinney is a Minnesota native and has taught religion at Bethel College for 20 years. She spoke about racism - its causes and how we might move beyond it. She spoke of how institutionalised it has been and how she experienced it as a black child attending a primarily Caucasian school growing up in Minneapolis. History lessons were focused on Europe with little mention of Africa or Asia. These and many other messages caused her to feel "less than" and "not capable of" despite her continued success in school and stellar grades all the way through her Ph.D. program. While acknowledging that much progress has been made, we should not tell ourselves we are "color blind" as we most assuredly are not. She encouraged us to read and be open to continuing to work on learning; committing ourselves to more fully understanding the unconscious socialization we've all encountered. In the not-so-distant past in our country, neither Irish immigrants nor Jews were considered part of the "white" race. While this has changed we must be aware of the work left to do before we can claim to have no color or racial boundaries in our society.
The guest speaker was Dan McNeil who works as the Executive Director of Peacemaker's Minnesota. The mission of PeaceMaker Minnesota is to help schools be safer places, free from bullying and harassment, and to help youth learn positive relationship skills. They do this by partnering with schools to help them be safer. They use credible surveys to help assess the level of school violence and bullying. They then will work with the schools to use existing programs that are proven to reduce bullying and violence in the schools. PeaceMaker Minnesota helps schools build sustainable anti-bullying programs that will be effective over the long term. They also work to measure success through program evaluation and surveys.
Today's speaker was Mary Chung - Director of Communication and Development for Solid Ground, an organization our club has actively supported for several years. Solid Ground's mission is to prevent and end homelessness for families with children through housing, resources and opportunity. They own a 34-unit apartment building in White Bear Lake which provides housing generally for up to 2 years for families in need. They also work to place families in other locations by working with landlords to facilitate these otherwise difficult placements. This is especially challenging in today's very tight rental market in the Twin Cities. Ms. Chung is a graduate of the Carlson School business program, which shows itself in the value she has placed on developing quantifiable measurements to demonstrate the value of this organization's efforts. They have produced impressive statistics around subsequent housing stability, educational advancement, and improvements in client's health and economic stability. Our Club's involvement with Solid Ground has been primarily through donations of money and gifts to clients during the holiday season. Ms. Chung presented pictures that included several members delivering gifts, which have been part of an extremely successful "Santa Shop" that clients can visit to obtain gifts during the Christmas season. We are also encouraged to consider other volunteer opportunities such as tutoring or driving clients to appointments. Donations of new and gently use household items are also greatly appreciated.
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