Rotattler for September 7, 2019 and Beyond
Welcome to September and we had a pretty full house for our first meeting of the last month of summer. This is a busy club, so it’s great to see all those helpful faces!
Announcements:
The Pumpkinman volunteers were reminded that their work was set for the following Saturday and Sunday. Each volunteer stint (some members were doing more than one assignment) will earn us $25 towards the scholarship fund. We can sure use anything we get for replenishing our scholarship funds!
Early October is the Rotary district conference, a switch from waiting until the following spring to have this district-wide celebration. We will have a booth/table showing off what we do, and Richard Donhauser has agreed to pull together a Jeopardy game for our display, as we have done before at one of our past meetings. Hope you can go.
All local organizations have been asked to do something at the Eliot Festival Days in commemoration of the state of Maine’s 200th anniversary celebration. So we will be there with a corn-hole game. There will be a sign-up sheet for help manning the game and prizes and popcorn and such. That will be on the last Saturday in September in beautiful downtown Eliot.
The Friday before the Eliot Festival Day is the William Fogg Library’s dance and auction to raise funds for their organization. It will be at the Regatta. See Kim Brooker for more details if you wish.
The Sunshine Boys at Kittery’s Star Theatre was a fun event for all those who attended. It was a laugh a minute. It ran until September 8th, so we hope you got to see it.
Food Pantry was on Thursday and we hoped to see lots of helpers there.
As promised last year, the family of the late David Burke made another annual donation of $1000 in his memory. We do miss him.
Speaking of donations, the Molly Banville fundraising has gone well and their latest event earned over $30000 to go towards Molly’s family’s expenses while enduring her medical struggles in Cleveland. Our prayers go out to them all.
Speaker for the Day
We welcomed Brad Paige, CEO and President of Kennebunk Savings Bank and Liz Torrence, Social Responsibility Officer. It was truly inspirational to hear about KSB’s community contributions. This is the 25th year of donating 10% of their profits to non-profits. To date, about $13 million has gone back to the communities served by the bank – helping countless non-profits and providing over 140,000 volunteer hours. We have witnessed this with all of our KSB employee Rotarians who have been members of our club, and thank our lucky stars for Kim Brooker, our current KSB “angel”. In the past, there were ballots and people voted for organizations and each vote translated into dollars to them. Most recently, they decided to focus on a Spotlight Fund and identified issues of greatest concern. In 2018 the focus was on food insecurity. This year, with $125K to spend and cognizant of the overdoses and problems associated with opioids and deadlier drugs, they took on this issue with a multi-faceted approach: 1) capacity building, 2) youth (education and prevention), 3) safe disposal (they have bags you can get to dispose of drugs), 4) increasing involvement by people in solving the problems, and 5) ending the stigma. Recipients this year include Northeast Passage which includes Recovery in Action, SOS Recovery in NH for recovery coaching programs, Portland Recovery in Maine, York county shelter programs, Hope on Haven Hill for pregnant and parenting women in Somersworth and Rochester, Triangle Club which provides meeting places, Choose to Be Healthy and others that works with schools, Dover Youth to Youth, and more.
On September 25th they will host a Business Alliance forum and conference around this topic, called “Shining a Light” and you may sign up on-line to attend.
Brad and Liz brought with them Deterra Paks which they are distributing so folks can deactivate their medicines at home and just throw them in the trash when done. These can be obtained at any Kennebunk Savings Bank.
Later this week…
There were lots of club members at the Pumpkinman Races this past weekend. We are grateful for your volunteer spirit and generosity of time and energy.