At Your Service(formerly RadioRotary)

Highland Rotarian and District 7210 President (2020-21) Tony Marmo is the guest on this RadioRotary program. His District of 56 Rotary clubs (including the brand-new Passport Rotary Club) is participating in the Million Mask Challenge, a program started by a Connecticut Rotarian that is designed to provide face masks to organizations. Face masks have been called the best way to stop the spread of...

Animal Farm Foundation Manager Nicole Juchem visits RadioRotary via Zoom to tell RadioRotary listeners about a new program from the Animal Farm Foundation geared to easing the social isolation that the covid-19 lock-downs are causing: virtual pet visits . Starting with a visit to the Pets Together website https://petstogether.org/ , you can book your virtual pet visit. The website includes a choic...

Rotary International and the Rotary Foundation have seven areas of focus, among them “Promoting Peace.” One of the main ways this is accomplished is by providing full fellowships for Master’s Degrees in Peace and Conflict Prevention and Resolution. On this show RadioRotary welcomes one of those Peace Fellows, Bianca Neff, founder and CEO of Petra Peacebuillders. Her organization promotes peace in...

RadioRotary interviews author and journalist Dan Goldberg about his book The Golden 13: How Black Men Won the Right to Wear Navy Gold.  Mr. Goldberg, an award-winning writer for Politico, spent eight years researching the story of the first Black officers in the U.S. Navy, working to restore these men to their rightful place in history. World War II was nearing its end in January 1944. The Na...

RadioRotary cohosts discuss the work of the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley with its new director, Sara Gunn. Part of the Food Banks of the Northeast, the Hudson Valley organization normally provides 16 million tons of food each year to local food pantries, senior citizen centers, homeless shelters, and similar organizations throughout the five-counties of the mid-Hudson valley—but because of the p...

RadioRotary was delighted to have Mary Howard come to the program to tell about Toastmasters International, recently partnered with Rotary. Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that teaches public speaking and leadership skills through a worldwide network of more than 16,200 clubs in 145 countries with more than 364,000 members. Since 1924, Toastmasters International...

Every holiday season one of the great charities that everyone loves to help is Toys for Tots. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, the Marines are still coming to help children who might otherwise go without holiday presents. Toys for Tots was started in 1947 by Marine Corps Reserve Major Bill Hendricks and his wife Diane to provide toys for children in need—distributing 5,000 toys in that first yea...

Amelia Legare saw a red barn at Greig Farm in Red Hook and many possibilities for improving the environment. As a gardening instructor for an elementary school, she started with talking to farm-owner Norman Greig about starting a native-plant garden at the farm but soon a host of ideas for using local ingredients in household items, selling them in bulk to reduce use of plastic, forming a communit...

Poughkeepsie South Rotarian Christina Boryk, Executive Director of Dutchess Rebuilding Together (in photo), and Kelly Formoso, Executive Director of Hudson Valley Red Cross, visit RadioRotary through Zoom for this fascinating discussion of home safety measures, especially smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms. Rebuilding Together is in the business of improving homes, both with major renovations (such...

RadioRotary is especially delighted to be able to interview Jennifer Jones, who for the Rotary Year 2022-23 will be president of Rotary International (RI), the first woman in the 115-year history of Rotary to achieve that high office. Until a little more than 30 years ago, there were no women officially in Rotary—a club in California that accepted women in 1977 was dropped from RI for this violati...

RadioRotary interviews Christa Hines, Executive Director of Hudson River Housing, a vital service primarily in Dutchess County (but also with some facilities in Orange and Columbia counties). Hudson River Housing helps solve the housing problems of the Mid-Hudson with temporary, transitional, or permanent housing. As many as 100 individuals who are homeless can be served at the pods housing (forme...

Ever since 1993, Dutchess Outreach has provided free coats and other warm clothing at the start of winter for those in need in Dutchess County. Starting at the beginning of October and continuing into November, coats are donated at sites all over the country—all Guardian Self Storage, Red Cap Cleaners, and Rhinebeck Bank locations. Recently the coat drive has been augmented with help from Rotary c...

Founded in 1947  by Brewster Rotarian and 7210 Past District Governor (1962-63) Dr, Samuel “Rollo” Ross,  Green Chimneys is recognized as a worldwide leader in animal-assisted therapy and educational activities for children with special needs. RadioRotary learned all about this very unusual facility for children on the autistic spectrum when the current when Dr. Edward Placke visited the...

RadioRotary is visited, via Zoom, by 33-year Rotarian and 7210 Past District Governor (2006-07) Carole Tjoa, a member of the North Rockland Rotary Club and currently the District PolioPlus Chair. Mrs. Tjoa tells the story of how Rotary, when polio was completely eliminated from the U.S. in 1979, took the vaccines that stopped the disease to the Philippines and on September 29 began its long associ...

Through the magic of Zoom. RadioRotary interviews John Hewko, the General Secretary and Chief Executive Officer of both Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation. As CEO he directs some 800 Rotary employees in the United States and around the world—Rotary has 1.2 million members worldwide, with only about 25% of them in the United States. Rotarians are committed to doing good in the world as...

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck Red Hook, NY, Dan Budd, a local businessman with ties to the youth community and a high-school student, Chris Donohue, decided that they could organize volunteers to solve some of the immediate problems the community faces. RadioRotary on this program interviews Red Hook Responds cofounder Dan Budd, owner of Taste Budd’s Café in Red Hook Village, about how Red Hoo...

RadioRotary hosts some principal planners from Third Eye Associates: President Beth Jones, Red Hook Rotarian and Vice-President Sue Simon (in photo), and Communications Manager Jennifer McKinley, who together discuss the problems and solutions for your finances in this time of the Covid-19 recession. Learn more: Third Eye Associates: mailto:https://www.thirdeyeassociates.com/ The Covid-19 Recessio...

The show is a “triple play,” as co—hosts Sarah O’Connell-Claitor and Jonah Triebwasser are joined by three representatives of the history-preservation teams of Dutchess County: Lisa Weiss from the Cider Mill Friends of Open Space and Historic Preservation; Bill Ponte of the Sports Museum of Dutchess County; and Amy McKenzie of the Fishkill Historical Society and Van Wyck Homestead Museum. These vo...

For twenty years, the Vassar-Haiti Project (VHP) has improved the lives of Haitians in the remote mountaintop Haitian village of Chermaitre and its surroundings, raising funds primarily by selling Haitian paintings and crafts. As a result of these efforts, Chermaitre and the surrounding area is served by a 300-student school, a clinic that treats 3,000 patients annually, and clean water, the last...

Trauma Injury Prevention Coordinator at Vassar Hospital Jill Bubel visits RadioRotary to promote the Lower Hudson Valley Fall Prevention Week, a series of online events devoted to teaching older persons how to avoid those often traumatic and sometimes deadly falls, the most common cause of serious injury or mortality in persons over 60. The events are sponsored by the offices for the aging of the...

Scott Oatkin, Political Affairs Ambassador for The Borgen Project, visits RadioRotary (via Zoom) to describe the efforts that he and other volunteers are making to encourage the United State Government to do more to help end world poverty. Around the world more than 700 million people live in extreme poverty, and The Borgen Project is dedicated to the proposition that the world’s richest nation sh...

Foundation Manager Nicole Juchem visits RadioRotary via Zoom to describe the many ways that the Animal Farm Foundation improves the way dogs, especially those who have been discriminated against because of appearance or breed, are accepted and also how their other programs training dogs or using their special qualities help people across the United States. Although the Animal Farm Foundation is ba...

Highland Rotarians Steve Laubach and Peter Rein visit RadioRotary via Zoom to tell how the club’s annual Ribfest has been reconfigured for the Covid-19 era. Due to the New York State Covid-19 guidelines, the Highland Rotary Club  decided to cancel the 2020 Hudson Valley Ribfest at the Ulster County Fairgrounds scheduled for August 21–23, 2020. The organizers recognized that the essence of the...

Daniela Pulice, Director of the Pleasant Valley Free Library, returns to the RadioRotary microphones to tell the co-hosts about the amazing progress the Library has made since the old building and collection were destroyed by fire on election day, 2018. Thanks to the generous gift of the use of a former grocery store by Pleasant Valley realtor Herb Redl, the Library was able to re-open in the dona...

RadioRotary welcomes Rotary International (RI) President Holger Knaack (via Zoom), a member since 1992 of the Rotary Club of Herzogtum Lauenburg-Mölln, Germany. He is proud to be the first RI president from Germany. President Knaack has held many posts in Rotary from Club President and District Governor to Director and Treasurer of Rotary International. His special interests have been the youth-ex...