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The club welcomed visiting Rotarian Bill Nielson from the St. Paul club since has not yet gone south to get out of the cold. It was announced that the club party would be held on Wednesday, December 18th at Bill and Jean Kiehnbaum's home.
The guest speakers were Melissa Cuff, Director of Development, Marketing and Communications for the Conservation Corps and Cari Wallin, who is currently working for the Conservation Corps. The Conservation Corps is the modern day program that was originally started in the 1930's to put people to work during the Great Depression. The current Conservation Corps mission is to provide hands-on environmental stewardship and service learning opportunities to youth and young adults while accomplishing conservation, natural resource management and emergency response work. The goal is to connect young people to the environment and prepare them for future employment.
The Conservation Corps currently has four programs: young adult field crew program, summer youth camp program, youth outdoors after school program, and an individual placement program. The CC partners with 200 different agencies to do projects. Cari talked about her experience in the program and shared some of her thoughts about the positive impact that it has had on her and others in the program. She also coined the phrase "nerding out" to describe what she does, which was very cool.