Happy 2020! January marks the beginning of a new year and a new decade. We are now halfway through the Rotary year and can take some time to reflect on our accomplishments during the first half of the Rotary year. Our club has grown with several new members who bring new enthusiasm and talents to our club. We have added new service projects while continuing to do projects we have supported in the past. Consistent with the ideas from the club visioning project we are looking for new community partners to expand the reach of the club. Financially we are in a sound position due to successful fundraising efforts at the Taste of the Hops and the Slice of Shoreview. We raised money for and obtained a district grant to support a sewing school in India and are raising money for a WASH project in Nigeria for which we hope to obtain a global grant from The Rotary Foundation. Members also have generously contributed to The Rotary Foundation and several members became new Paul Harris Fellows or added to their previous status as Paul Harris Fellows.
Many thanks to Bill and Jean Kiehnbaum for hosting the annual holiday party at their home. A good time was had by all.
The club elected a slate of officers and directors at the December 17 meeting. The members elected who will be officers and directors beginning July 1 are as follows: president, Glenn Bowers; president-elect, Mike Spellman; past president, Bill Klumpp; club service director, Kay Baker; community service director, Stephanie Cosgrove; international service director, Bob Freed; and youth service director, Anoop Mathur.
On January 7, we will begin 2020 with a Club Assembly led by President Bill Klumpp. January 14 will bring us Sarah Schultz and Nicole Hill from the United States Post Office. In their program, they will discuss the state of the industry.
The meeting on January 21 will be held at the offices of the Moundsview School District, 4570 Victoria Street N, Shoreview. Jeff Riddlehoover, a former club member, will give us a tour of the facility and talk about the state of the School District.
Jeff Dahlman, from Kids In Need Minnesota, will be our speaker on January 28. This is a non-profit program designed to help teachers educating students from low-income families. The Kids In Need Foundation’s mission is to ensure that every child is prepared to learn and succeed in the classroom by providing free school supplies nationally to students most in need. Their focus is to serve schools with 70% or more of students enrolled in the free or reduced lunch programs.
Seventeen students began the curriculum at the Sewing School in Amaravathi, India when the Sewing School was opened in May 2019 in the village of Amaravathi, a rural area in the Guntur District of the new state of Andhra Pradesh. Ten of these students have completed the curriculum and 6 or 7 of the students will continue to work on completing the curriculum and ten new student have now started their studies of the curriculum.
Our partner in this project, Pushpa, a U.S. based 501c3 non-profit organization located in Arden Hills, operates in India as a not for profit Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). Pushpa has been working in India for fourteen years.
Pushpa's mission is to help marginalized community members of rural Guntur district villages transition from migrant, subsistent lifestyles, dependent on seasonal labor and temporary shelter, to sustainable livelihoods in healthy communities. Its main goal is to work together with underprivileged (tribal) members of rural Guntur district villages to motivate socio-economic change in small ways, one person, one family, one student, at a time, through projects in which the recipients themselves participate. The organization strives to boost the self-confidence of individuals while at the same time teaching collective responsibility for the community, through teaching vocational skills that develop earning capability.
As many of you were aware, Gummadi Franklin, the driving force behind PUSHPA, was in country when the grant was received and was due to be coming home in a couple of weeks. He and his team were able to find a suitable location for the school and an experienced teacher for the school in anticipation of our receipt of our District Grant. All of the work to equip the school has been completed and the school has been established in Amaravathi and 16 students are now working to complete the teaching protocol that has been established for completion of the sewing training program.
One of the elders in Amaravathi is pictured below after he was given the honor of cutting the green ribbon in a ceremony for the opening of the school.
The picture below shows some of the students using the treadle sewing machines in the third floor sewing lab at the sewing school in Amaravathi.
The leaders of PUSHPA, both here in Arden Hills and in Andhra Pradesh, India are especially grateful for the support for the new sewing school from the Arden Hills Shoreview Rotary Club and Rotary District 5960 and have expressed their gratitude privately and acknowledge the Club’s sponsorship of the new school by erecting the sign shown in the picture below.
A lot of hard work went into obtaining this grant and there are many people to thank for their hard work and significant contributions. PUSHPA has now taken the baton and it is especially gratifying to see it take the first turn in the establishment of the new school, completing all the initial steps required to establish the new school in Amaravathi in such a short period of time.
We and Pushpa are thankful to the following Rotary Clubs for their generous support of our project: Belle Plaine; Brooklyn Park; Forrest Lake; Fridley Columbia Heights; New Brighton Mounds View; Prior Lake; Roseville; St. Croix Falls; St. Paul No. 10; Siren Webster; West St. Paul Mendota Heights; and White Bear Lake.
Today's speaker was Hannah Parish from Solid Ground. This is an organization our club has supported during the holiday season for the past number of years. It is a supportive housing agency based in White Bear Lake. It works with homeless families referred to them in Washington and Ramsey counties. The organization has a number of housing sites in the area. Last year Solid Ground provided housing for 82 families. It receives 1/3 of its funding from grants, 1/3 from the government, and 1/3 through donations. They also rely greatly on volunteers, who do everything from providing welcome baskets to assisting families with acquiring furnishings from Bridging and other organizations. At Christmas, a Santa's Workshop offers parents the opportunity shop for free children's toys, which is the activity our members have generously helped to support. In 2018, 65% of families that exited Solid Ground housing found permanent housing. This is due in part to training and support provided by the organization to help ensure that families have the knowledge and skills necessary to be good tenants.
Today's speaker was Jill Seward, head of nursing for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation - the addiction treatment and advocacy organization created in 2014 with the merger of the Minnesota-based Hazelden Foundation and the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, CA. The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation bases its residential and outpatient services on a twelve step, abstinence-based treatment model for individuals with addiction to alcohol and other drugs.The Foundation also includes the nation's largest addiction and recovery publishing house, a graduate school of addiction studies, an addiction research center, prevention training and an education arm for medical professionals, family members and other loved ones, as well as a children's program. There are 7 locations. Ms. Seward oversees a staff of 200 nurses across these locations. With changes in health care coverage, at least some of the treatment costs are covered by insurance for many people. Yet there are still many barriers, resulting in the fact that only 1 in 10 people struggling with addiction seeks treatment. Women in particular struggle this because of child and elder care responsibilities, yet women are as prone or perhaps more prone to addiction than men. Due to physiological differences, women move to addiction more rapidly and experience resulting organ and cognitive damage more quickly. We were urged to remember that the holidays can be a particularly dangerous time for people who may be struggling in this area.
The club welcomed visiting Rotarian Bill Nielson and guest Tony Turgeon to the meeting. Peggy Strom then presented a brief classification talk indicating that she was born in North Dakota and, after receiving a business degree, went to work for the Deloitte auditing firm. After a short time at Deloitte, she began a 36 year career at Medtronic, working in several positions in the Finance area. She has also went back to school and received her MBA. She joined the Rotary Club in 1996.
The guest speaker was Dana Healy who works at CTV North Suburbs. CTV is a multi-city consortium of cities that was formed to assist several cities in the north metro area of Ramsey County with negotiation and managing of the cable television franchise and with public access local programming. Her presentation focused on hyperlocal marketing which she defined as super targeted niche marketing towards a specific target audience. Hyper local marketing is designed to drive quality traffic to websites to improve profit at a reasonable cost. She talked about the importance of forming local partnerships between businesses and non-profit organizations that can benefit both parties. She also touched on CTV's role in assisting these partnerships and their goal to bring information and quality video content to the cities that they serve. She also reviewed some upcoming programming that is planned.
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