At Your Service(formerly RadioRotary)

Mental Health American Dutchess Country, which provides therapy and other mental-health needs, is now bringing the Mid-Hudson Addiction Recovery Centers (MARC) into its organization. Andrew O’Grady , Executive Director of the merging services, visits RadioRotary to tell about how the new relationship extends the reach of both organizations. Both are sponsors, along with People Inc. and Dutchess Co...

Pleasant Valley Rotarians Dave and Kathy Kruger, well known to listeners to RadioRotary as producer and occasional substitute host, are also both on the Board of the Pleasant Valley Library, which suffered a terrible fire on November 6. The fire started with an electrical problem in the basement, collapsed the first floor of the building, moved up through hollow walls to the attic, and essentially...

The ARC Westchester supports more than 2,000 children, teens, and adults who cope with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including (but not limited to) autism, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome. Millie Gaines, one of the 800 or so employees who works with clients at The ARC Westchester, visits the RadioRotary studios to describe some of the programs, which range from testing infants and...

The Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) for Dutchess Country serves students from the 13 school districts in the County at its Salt Point Turnpike Campus with career and technical education, adult education, and special-needs education. It also provides an Alternative High School in an industrial park off the Dutchess Turnpike. But all of that is scheduled to be improved or changed a...

The guest on RadioRotary for this program is Lori Decker, who with her husband George formed Angels of Light of the Hudson Valley about 15 years ago when they learned of a family that was dealing with a young very ill daughter—and the busy holiday season was at hand. The Deckers took over providing presents and other help for the family, a practice that became the origin of a charity that does the...

For eighteen years, the Vassar-Haiti Project, started and still directed by Lila Meade and her husband Andrew, assistant dean of international students at Vassar College, has improved the lives of Haitians in the remote mountaintop village of Chermaitre and its surroundings. Vassar sophomore Mary McCarthy, publicity director of the project, and Lila Meade were the guests on RadioRotary for this sh...

Nick Constantino (Clarkstown Sunrise Rotary Club) and Alexandra Duenas, president of Clarkstown Sunrise, are two of the Rotarians working in partnership with the Neiva Noches Plateñas Rotary to help terminally ill children in and around Neiva, Colombia. The project is called “Hearts, Dreams and Laughs,” because it mostly consists of hiring professional clowns and other entertainers to bring some s...

You may never have heard about canine discrimination, but you will learn a lot from this fascinating interview with Stacey Coleman and Nicole Juchem of the Animal Farm Foundation. The Foundation, which started in the 1980s as a refuse farm for horses, it now is a nationwide advocate for pit bulls and a trainer and supplier of service dogs. It specialized in training dogs for very specific tasks, s...

RadioRotary interviews Zach Kirshner of the Hudson Valley Veterans Alliance, an organization that bridges the gap between serving the nation and services available to veterans. Since 2016 the volunteers of the Veterans Alliance have connected veterans with housing, mental health assistance, physical health needs, financial aid, and other useful services. The volunteers themselves have come togethe...

The Hudson Valley has a rich heritage of Italian immigration, making Putnam, Dutchess, Orange, Ulster, and Rockland counties among those with the highest percentages of Italian-Americans in the entire nation. The annual Italian-American Festival on the Kingston Waterfront celebrates this heritage with food, music, and Italian-American-themed products—free admission and free parking. It is a projec...

Newburgh Rotarians Doug Sturomski and Andrew Ciccone visit RadioRotary to describe the club’s annual fundraiser, The Taste of Greater Newburgh, which takes place under a tent on the campus of Mount Saint Mary College, making it a rain-or-shine event. Over two-dozen food or drink vendors provide an all-you-can-eat-or-drink experience for a modest per-person fee. The money raised each year supports...

RadioRotary interviews Poughkeepsie-Arlington Rotarian Veronica McMillan, an attorney, and Janna Whearty, Executive Director of the Dutchess Country Bar Association, on the programs of the Country Bar, an organization of 548 attorneys practicing in Dutchess County and the Hudson Valley. The group is best known for evaluating candidates for judgeships, but it does much more. One of the useful servi...

RadioRotary co-hosts Sarah O’Connell-Claitor and Jonah Triebwasser interview two Patterson Rotarians, Billy Flash and Paul Toscana, about the Patterson Rotary’s annual Blues and BBQ Festival, a music-and-food tradition in Putnam County for the past seven years. Unlike most similar events, admission and parking are both free, which includes enjoying as many as nine different bands playing blues, ro...

RadioRotary interviews Geoff Miller, Chair of the Steering Committee for the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History, a project of the Jewish Federation of Ulster County. The Center is a museum celebrating all the immigrants who settled the region, not just the Jews, and occupies a 19th-century Jewish bakery that primarily served the immigrants who streamed into America throughout the 19th...

The Hudson Valley has a long history of ghosts and mysteries, but the most famous may be the Headless Horseman, a figure from Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, loosely based on a legend from the American Revolution. RadioRotary interviews Jonathan Kruk and his wife, film-maker Andrea Sadler Kruk. It is Jonathan who tells the story of the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollo...

RadioRotary interviews President Mike Fick and Alicia Marcinkowski of the recently merged Kingston Rotary Club, which manages to be both the newest and oldest Rotary in District 7210 at the same time. It is newest because of the recent merger of the Kingston Sunshine Club with the original Kingston Rotary and the oldest as the original club originated in 1916, just 11 years after Rotary started in...

Recorded live by RadioRotary at the Highland Rotary Club, Highland Rotarians Steve Laubach and Don Verity tell about the glories of eating barbecue (and listening to music) at the fourteenth annual Hudson Valley Ribfest, the biggest, best barbecue in New York State, which takes place every August at Ulster County Fairgrounds just outside New Paltz. In addition to great food and music by local perf...

RadioRotary interviews three distinguished Rotarians: Donna Gunn of the Lakeway/Lake Travis (Texas) Rotary Club, Peggy Rogers of Sebastopol (California) Rotary, and Rotary 2017-18 President Ian H.S. Riseley of the Sandringham (Australia) Club as all visit the International Convention in Toronto, Ontario. Ms. Gunn is Special Projects Chair of Rotary 3D Limbs, which proved 3D printed limbs, primaril...

Mid-Hudson American Cancer Society (Aired on July 28 and 29, 2018) Kristine Revelle of the American Cancer Society in the Mid-Hudson comes to RadioRotary to discuss the many ways that the Cancer Society is fighting the hundreds of diseases that we lump together as cancer. The Society emphasizes education about the causes of cancer, advocacy for cancer issues with local and national governments, re...

Mary Albrecht of the Town of Pleasant Valley visits RadioRotary to describe the annual festival known as Pleasant Valley Week end, which has moved from its previous time in September to July. The event features three separate parades through the hamlet—a motorcycle parade on Friday, the big parade and fireworks on Saturday, and a parade of automobiles on Sunday. Most of the events and activities d...

Here are four more stories of people putting service before self from the 2018 Toronto Rotary International Convention. Sole 4 Souls not only distributes shoes and other clothing around the world, but also creates sustainable jobs in third-world nations. World Bicycle Relief does not provide relief for bicycles, but provides bicycles for relief of travel problems in places with bad roads or none....

Each year RadioRotary takes its microphone to the Rotary International Convention, which in 2018 is in Toronto, Ontario. Some 24,000 Rotarians are in attendance and RadioRotary gets as many of the great stories as it can. One of the interviews in this show is with Ellen Haggerty, a Pleasant Valley Rotarian whose mission to improve hearing and make life easier for those who are hearing impaired tak...

RadioRotary interviews Kimberly Kochen, Executive Director of The Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, located in Poughkeepsie, N, the nonprofit agency dedicated to the reduction of child maltreatment since 1973. Among their programs are outreach to elementary schools for educating children and to PTAs and other groups for educating adults. Almost 17,000 children per year are served, mostly t...

District Governor 2018-19 Christine Giangrasso (Aired on June 23 and 24, 2018) A long-standing tradition of RadioRotary is the interview with each incoming District Governor (DG) of District 7210, the person who will lead the 55 clubs in 8 counties that make up the District. From July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2018, that person will be Christine (“Chrissy G.”) Giangrasso of the Highland Rotary Club. DG...

Marjorie Nichols Keith, Executive Director of the Putnam Country Cornell Cooperative Extension, brings 4-H Club member Patrick Salerno to RadioRotary to help tell about the 47th annual Putnam County 4-H Fair at Veteran Memorial Park in Carmel. The Fair is a big family event with food booths, music, a Master Gardener plant sale, horse and dog shows, an auction, and activities such as Touch a Truck...