Our annual children’s Home Society Gala fundraiser was Saturday night at the Holiday Inn Downtown. Thank you to our emcee Darla Crown and auctioneer Jeff Kingsbury for a fun and successful night. Guests were quite generous during the auctions raising $75,000! We were entertained by the wonderful Craig Karges and his amazing tricks and demonstrations. Thank you to all who attended and so generously donated to support the advocacy center.
Our speaker today was Nick Van Dyne, Program Coordinator for TeamMates Mentoring Program of Rapid City. Their mission is to positively impact the world by inspiring Students to reach their full potential through mentoring. Teammates was founded in 1991 by coach Tom Osborne and his wife Nancy. They are in 192+ school districts in 5 states. They came to Rapid City in 2019 and are currently in 9 schools with 62 matches. Mentoring has led to improvement in grades, attendance, and fewer disciplinary issues. 98% of their students graduate high school and TeamMates also offers scholarships to mentees. They are always looking for mentors. If you would like to volunteer or need more information you can find them on Facebook at Rapid City TeamMates, or their webpage: chapters.teammates.org/chapters/rapid-city.
Congratulations to Jeff Kingsbury who received his Paul Harris Fellow today.
Today was Rotary day. We had a wonderful presentation from fellow Rotarians Roger Heacock, his wife Chris and Janet Kahler on their 3 week Rotary Friendship trip to India. 13 Rotarians and family traveled to India and were exquisitely hosted by the Rapid City Rotary Club’s sister club, the Rotary Club of Madras. Flags were exchanged and they visited some of their bigger projects in the area. They were also taken sight seeing and shopping along with beautifully hosted receptions. Thank you to Ashok Kumar, Mike & Vasti Gibson, and Carol Johnson from the noon club for joining us this morning to share this wonderful trip.
Welcome to our newest member, Mikaela Leners. She received her Rotary pin and 4-Way Test plaque today.
Mikaela graduated cum laude from Iowa State University with a major in physics and minors in astronomy, biology, and English. After concluding that oil field work was too dangerous, Mikaela began teaching. She has taught in most school types: a parochial boarding school in New Hampshire, an all girls private school in Pennsylvania, a public school in the frontier of Utah, a classical academy in Florida and an online school. She currently teaches remote by contract to schools without a classroom teacher. With educator endorsements in math, physics, chemistry and general science, she has taught over 18 different courses including math grade 6, observational astronomy and trigonometry based physics. She has taken advantage of her time off in the summer to work as a backcountry ranger for Glacier National Park and to become a wilderness emergency medical technician. Outside of the classroom, she mentors undergraduate students and volunteers at the humane society. In addition, she spends a lot of time hiking in the backcountry. For example, last summer, she foraged over 55 pounds of wild red raspberries.
We received letters from our sponsored students at The School of St. Jude, Hilary Mathew and Princess Sillass Mollel. It’s great to see how wonderful they are doing.
Rushmore Rotarians and friends packed 732 backpacks Tuesday for Feeding South Dakota which will help children in the Rapid City area. Great job! Thanks for coming out to help.
Our speaker today was Ronda Gusinsky, Executive Director of Life Sight. Life Sight has been in Rapid City for 30 years and provides free vision screening for those who don’t have access or means to eye health exams. Their goal is to protect and restore vision. Most insurance, including Medicare does not cover eye exams. Under the Kids First vision screening program they go into schools and do a free screening for the kids up to 5th grade. They also do screenings as young as 6 months. If any vision issues are detected a copy is given to the parents so they can have an eye exam done. There are vouchers for income based needs. So far they have screened over 57,000 kids throughout the black hills. Life Sight also helps adults get eye care so they can maintain an independent lifestyle. They are looking for volunteers to help scan at the schools. For more information please visit their website www.lifesightsd.org
Congratulations to Scott Van Dam and Mark Barry on receiving their Paul Harris Fellow +3.
Today we welcomed the winners of the 4-Way Test essay contest from the Rapid City Alternative Academy. The essays covered how the Rotary 4-Way Test can be instilled in our lives and in school. 4th place- Lexi Herman -$200 3rd place- Hunter Johnson -$300 2nd place- Talia Miller -$400 1st place- Geannavieve Weitzel who received a plaque and $500. The winning essay was read to us. What an impressive essay! Congratulations to all!
Our speaker today was Alysala Malik, daughter of fellow Rushmore Rotarian April Malik and a 3rd year medical school student. She gave an incredible talk about her concern for the large amounts of commercial food waste versus the high numbers of food insecure people. In college she got involved with collecting excess food from dorms, stores, and restaurants to give to the food insecure. This led her to apply and receive a Watson Fellowship which allowed her to conduct independent exploration of this subject outside the U.S. for 1 year. In her year she visited France, India, Nepal and spent 3 months in Madagascar. She lived among the food insecure and worked with groups trying to help. She was able to see different solutions and a need for long term solutions by meeting and talking with the local people to find out the whys. Infrastructure, education in farming and clean water were often the long term solutions. Thank you for such a great topic and impactful talk.
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