At Your Service(formerly RadioRotary)

Christine Giangrasso (Highland Rotary), 2018-19 District Governor for Rotary District 7210, reports to RadioRotary on her year of traveling to 55 of the 56 Rotary clubs in the 8 counties that make up the Lower Hudson Valley District (Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, and Ulster). DG Giangrasso is proud of her record of adding a new club, a new Interact, and 2 new Rota...

Stacey Hengsterman, President and CEO Special Olympics New York, visits RadioRotary on the occasion of the Special Olympics Summer Games for New York State being held in Dutchess County, with Vassar College as the principal site. While we think of the Special Olympics primarily in terms of the 30 Olympic –style team and individual sports, the full program of health, education and community buildin...

Since 1862, states were empowered to set aside land that would be used to fund institutes of higher education that would feature agriculture and engineering along with other studies. These “land-grant colleges” became the basis of a 1914 law that had the Department of Agriculture work in improving agriculture and rural life. Today every state has cooperative extensions that carry out this mandate,...

RadioRotary interviews Kathy Sanderson, who decided at age 61 to join the Peace Corps after she became a widow “and the children left and the dog died.” After preliminary training, Ms. Sanderson was stationed on the island of Vanua Lava, among the larger of the 82 islands that make up the nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, a 3-hour airplane trip west of Australia. Having been a mathematics te...

 Lake Mahopac Rotarian Greg Amato in this program tells about several of the community activities he has been supporting since his retirement as police chief of the town of Carmel. He has been in Rotary for 25 years and works on his club’s annual fundraiser of raffling off a new Corvette, a practice the club has maintained for 35 years. The proceeds of the raffle all go to support community p...

The Anderson Center for Autism returns as a topic for RadioRotary, this time with guests Chrissy Wolcott and Lisa Susczynski telling about some of the programs and techniques used at the Center to improve the lives of children and adults who are on the autism spectrum. Autism is a complex syndrome that required a medical diagnosis to identify. The spectrum ranges from persons with slight problems...

Dana Pavelock, Vice President for Provider Relations at Evercare in Newburgh, NY, and Brian Jones of the Dutchess County Office for the Aging visit RadioRotary to discuss issues related to abuse of senior citizen, known as “elder abuse.” Evercare is a not-for-profit provider of health services for the aging. The Dutchess Office for the Aging provides many services to older citizen, ranging from re...

Learn more: Rotary Club of Goshen, NY: https://www.goshennyrotary.org/   Goshen Rotary on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rotary-Club-of-Goshen-NY-221599024649451/ CATEGORIES Events Nutrition Rotary Club Close-ups

RadioRotary takes its microphone to a meeting of Red Hook Rotary for breakfast at Cancun’s. Rotarian Dave Wright describes this year’s Apple Blossom Festival, a village-wide celebration of spring with many food and craft vendors as well as live entertainment and special treats for children. In addition to commercial activity, organizations such as the high school, library, and town board have info...

RadioRotary hosts Beth Alter, Director of Behavioral Health Diversion Services for Dutchess Country, who has been a part of the county government for over 30 year in substance abuse and mental health services. Her topics on this program are the life-saving medicine Narcan, the County HELPLINE, the Mobile Crisis Intervention Team, and the Stabilization Center at 230 North Road in Poughkeepsie. Her...

Andrew O’Grady, CEO of Mental Health American Dutchess County (MHA) and Executive Director of the Med-Hudson Recovery Centers, Inc. (MARC) returns to the RadioRotary microphones to tell more about those two organizations and also to help promote fundraising for MARC and for addiction/alcoholism prevention and recovery through the MARC Foundation. With about 200 employees, MHA and MARC make a signi...

On Election Day 2018 fire ravaged the Pleasant Valley Free Library building. Pleasant Valley Rotarian, Dave Kruger, president of the library board, received the first notice at 6:45 a.m. but the 150-year-old wooden structure was already in flames throughout the interior. Although sentimental artifacts were recovered by brave firefighters, most of the 52,000 books were damaged beyond what repairs w...

Wappingers Falls Rotarians Sue Bennett and Steve Crew visit RadioRotary to tell about two great fundraisers and how their club uses the funds to support community and international projects. One of the fundraisers, suggested to Rotary by Dutchess County Tourism, is “A Cup of the Valley,” a coffee-and-tea festival recognizing such local suppliers as Greenwood Lake Roasters Craft Coffee and Harney &...

RadioRotary welcomes Red Hook Rotarian Susan Simon and her partner Beth Jones , both of Third Eye Associates, to discuss the important topic of financial planning. High on the list is dealing with the new (2018) tax law. Many families were surprised to learn that they had failed to have sufficient funds deducted for taxes, causing them to face large payments needed in the spring of 2019. Dealing w...

John Flowers was one of the most important community organizers in recent years in Poughkeepsie. In this interview, his son Frankie Flowers tells some of the history of his father’s charities and describes how he and his sister Yvonne, a Council representative in the city, are continuing his legacy. It started 25 years ago when John Flowers observed a lonely and unhappy woman in Vassar Hospital. H...

Matthew Swerdloff and his wife Elisa Gold return to RadioRotary to tell about the many activities and events that the Maya Gold Foundation has been sponsoring in the past couple of years and into the future. They created the Maya Gold Foundation in honor of their daughter Maya who committed suicide at the age of 15, but the Foundation is not primarily involved with suicide prevention. Instead, the...

Photohistorian and local history activist David Rocco visits RadioRotary to tell about the project to mount a plaque in Veterans Park, Beacon, NY, to commemorate two airplane crashes on Mount Beacon. Mount Beacon, named for its role in the use of a fire atop the mountain during the American revolution that would notify Washington’s army of British advances toward West Point, is the highest peak of...

Abby Nathanson revisits RadioRotary to talk about the new Grace Year program that allows recent college graduates to spend a year of intentional living, focusing on spirituality, religion, and justice. Ms. Nathanson previously was interviewed on RadioRotary about another program that she has instituted, EPIC (Engaging People in Change), which provides leadership training for high-school students i...

RadioRotary’s co-host Jonah Triebwasser interviews three members of the staff of Literacy Connections of the Hudson Valley: Debra Paskowski, Katherine Stikkers, and Marian Thompson. A surprising number of adults are unable to read English, either because they did not learn to read as a child or perhaps they grew up speaking a language other then English. Literacy Connections helps resolve reading...

By New York State law, every county, city, town, and village in the state must have a historian. Will Tatum, Country Historian for Dutchess County, visits RadioRotary to describe the many ways that he and his fellow historians promote the story of our own past. Dutchess County, settled in Colonial Days, was most famously the site of battles and developments in the Revolutionary period, but also ho...

RadioRotary interviews Suffern Rotarian Larry Palant , membership chair for Rotary District 7210, about changes in Rotary membership opportunities and ways to increase membership in Rotary clubs, including new types of clubs that have been invented to make membership easier for the very busy young professionals. Today, about half the clubs in the eight-country District 7210 meet weekly for lunch,...

Deanna Mancuso tells the story of how her troubled grandfather’s gift of a   horse with a bad personality led her create the Lucky Orphans Horse Rescue farm, which now hosts 50 formerly abused horses at a permanent farm and animal sanctuary in Dover Plains. Today these horses are providing significant equine-assisted therapy to humans in need of help—it is “people helping horses heal peo...

Millbrook Rotarian Ellie Savoy visits RadioRotary to talk about the ways that her program for healthful living, outlines in her International best-seller Stop Dieting and Start Living has changed her life and the lives of her many clients. Once 30 pounds overweight and a yo-yo dieter, Ms. Savoy had reorganized her life by making health a Priority, by avoiding Pretending, by focusing on the Percept...

Seth Collegrave is a young composer and videographer who has been developing multimedia presentations of the history and prominent landmarks in the Hudson Valley.  Having grown up in the lower Hudson Valley, he came to appreciate how important the region has been in US history.  After studying composition and media at the Berkley School of Music in Boston and a brief period working in Lo...

Clarkstown-Sunrise Rotarians Past District Governor Nick Constantino and club President Alex Duenas tell RadioRotary about their visit to Neiva, Colombia, where the Huellas Fundación brings laughter into the lives of terminal ill children in four hospitals. In English, the Huellas Fundación is the Footprints Foundation with Meaning of Life. Teenagers and college students form the basis of the Foun...