At Your Service(formerly RadioRotary)

Broadcasting from the Red Hook Rotary meeting, the RadioRotary cohosts interview Kimberly McGrath, Executive Editor of the Red Hook Area Chamber of Commerce. The Red Hook Area Chamber has more than 280 active members representing 170 businesses and is still growing. Primarily it acts to promote local businesses with its weekly newsletter and to help local business persons meet and get to know each...

Rhinebeck Rotarian Bob Phillips, along with 23 other Rotarians from around the United States (and some from Canada and the United Kingdom) went to Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa in the summer of 2015—mission, prevent polio. As he told the RadioRotary co-hosts, the ten-day trip was the most memorable experience of his life, from the West African Fair to actually administering the two drops of polio v...

Pleasant Valley Rotarian, registered nurse, and RadioRotary producer Kathy Kruger is on the other side of the microphone as co-hosts Jonah Triebwasser and Sarah O’Connell interview her about the Rotaplast program to correct cleft lip or palate, burn scarring, and other deformities. Cleft lip or palate causes many health problems as well as affecting speech, impairing ability to eat, and causing so...

Michael Christophides, Chief Inspector and Laboratory Director of Granit Inspection Group, joins co-host Sarah O’Connell and guest co-host and physicist David Kruger to describe the hazards of the gas radon, which can accumulate in buildings or in well water. Radon is an odorless radioactive gas that is released from rocks of all kinds, but especially from granite or dark shales found in the Hudso...

RadioRotary interviews Maggie Kwet, the Aging Information Services Specialist at the Dutchess County Office of the Aging, on the many services provided for seniors in the County, which deal with health, the law, transportation, home care, food, energy and heating, grandparenting, and more. The Office of the Aging (845-486-2555) conducts group and individual help with Medicare. It offers programs t...

RadioRotary interviews Kayo Iwama, Associate Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard College, about music education at the college and the performances open to the public. Bard has an unusual undergraduate degree program in music because each student must also obtain a degree in another subject, such as mathematics or political science. The Graduate Vocal Arts Program owes its existenc...

Rotary Foundation's motto of “Doing Good in the World” is the subject of this show.

Rhinebeck Rotarian Lou Trapani, Artistic and Managing Director of The Center for the Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, returns to RadioRotary to discuss some of the upcoming performances at the big red barn on Route 308. Also in the interview, Mr. Trapani describes the education program at the Center, which includes a touring company that performs The Wizard of Oz, Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sl...

RadioRotary interviews New York State Senator Sue Serino on efforts to reduce Lyme Disease in the Hudson Valley and to free physicians to treat chronic Lyme Disease with longer courses of intravenous antibiotics. Lyme Disease is one of several tick-borne illnesses that are widespread in the Hudson Valley. Many believe that when it fails to be cured either by no treatment or inadequate treatment, i...

RadioRotary interviews Sue Puett, Executive Director of Warwick Reformed Church’s Backpack Snack Attack program, and Warwick Valley Rotarian Stan Martin about this effective approach to making sure that children who receive free lunches at school during the week do not go hungry on weekends. The program started in 2009 by Warwick Reformed Church with a financial assist from a Rotary District Grant...

RadioRotary interviews recovering addict Cara Mia Bacchiochi about her street ministry called Hope on a Mission HOAM, a volunteer effort to help women who are homeless because of addiction to drugs or alcohol. Working in the city of Poughkeepsie, Bacchiochi and volunteer helpers distribute water and such personal care items as baby wipes to homeless women on a weekly basis. As with other parts of...

Eliza Bozenski is the development director for the Anderson Center for Autism, a nonprofit educational and therapeutic organization that includes day and residential programs for children and adults as well as diagnostics, training, and consultation for families or schools. Its hundred-acre walkable campus on the Hudson, where autistic students learn in classes with 6 or fewer other students, is j...

RadioRotary interviews Zamir Hassan, founder of The Hunger Van, a volunteer effort to bring food to the hungry homeless. In 2000, Hassan chaperoned a school trip to a local food pantry and was astonished by how many were going hungry in his prosperous New Jersey community. He says that in his tradition, you are not supposed to go to sleep if your neighbor is hungry, so he began to work on ways to...

Millbrook Rotarian Joyce Heaton describes this year’s New Year’s Eve Millbrook a community event that is family friendly and alcohol free. Twelve years earlier, the Rotary Club of Millbrook was seeking a way to help bring the village and environs together as a community. In October of that year, Joyce—who was aware of First Night Celebrations in Boston and elsewhere—proposed that the club sponsor...

Rotary has had a unique role in the United Nations starting even before the UN was founded. Each year the United Nations invites more than a thousand Rotarians, members of associated groups such as Rotaract and Interact, and students participating in Rotary international Youth Exchange to come to UN headquarters in New York for panel discussions with Rotary leadership, UN ambassadors, and heads of...

The Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) is a Federal program that operates on a country level, providing vocational training for low-income persons age 55 or older. In Dutchess County the SCSEP office is part of PathStone, located in Wappingers Falls. SCSEP counselors Cheryl George, Patsy Kimbrew, Sheila Rock, and Marlene Fredericks describe the program, which provides training in...

Pleasant Valley Rotarian, and 2015 winner of the Jeffrey Keahon Foundation Award, David Kruger describes the work of The Rotary Foundation, the part of Rotary that not only does good in the world away from our communities, but also helps fund many local projects. While its most notable success has been the worldwide reduction of polio to a handful of cases in two countries—with complete eliminatio...

Salvation Army Captains Sam and Jenny Alarcon visit RadioRotary to describe some of the many ways that The Salvation Army works to solve problems in Poughkeepsie and the Hudson Valley. The Salvation Army, founded in London by William Booth in 1865, is a worldwide Christian church that is organized along military lines. Its mission includes meeting human needs without discrimination. From its first...

Cancer survivor Holly VanDerbeck tells about her experiences with Stage 3 melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. Originally detected as a change in a mole, her cancer showed up later in lymph nodes, but was arrested by a combination of surgery and interferon, a drug that stimulates the immune system to attack cancer. A basic step to avoid skin cancers is to protect your skin from the ultra...

Red Hook Rotarian Gale Wolfe is interviewed about her participation in a medical mission to Tibet for this “live from the meeting” RadioRotary interview, recorded during a regular meeting of the Red Hook Rotary Club. Gale accompanied her husband, Dr. Dean Bloch, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and various other medical personnel on a mission to bring aid to a remote village in Tibet. Their whole fam...

Rotary District 7210 Past District Governor Bill Bassett (Walkill East Rotary Club) describes the history and current success of the effort, started by Rotary in 1979, to completely eradicate the terrible disease poliomyelitis, commonly called polio. Polio has a long history as a human disease that often causes lifetime paralysis or even death. In the early 1980s a thousand persons per day contrac...

Abby Nathanson, Director and Co-Founder of EPIC; Carleton Harris, consultant from the Youth Arts Group; and Evelyn Garzetta, Director of Latino Outreach at Millbrook, NY, Grade Episcopal Church describe new and old programs inspired by Rural and Migrant Ministry that focus on Northeastern Dutchess County. EPIC (Engaging People in Change) gathers high-school students from around NE Dutchess and hol...

Leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma care cancers of the blood cells. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society funds research that has greatly reduced the death rate from these cancers, and the Society also provides education and support for patients as well as advocacy for better treatments and services. One way that you can help fund the Society and also increase awareness is to participate in one of the se...

The name “Dutchess Outreach” does not tell much about the organization’s mission, which is to meet the basic needs of low-income people when no other resources are readily available. To this end Dutchess Outreach runs the major food pantry in Dutchess County; a traveling “green market” for fresh fruits and vegetables; the Lunch Box, which provides healthy hot lunches and dinners; and a winter coat...

Vietnam vets and Spring Valley Rotarians Howard Goldin and Ed Frank return to RadioRotary with news of the latest developments for Schools to End Poverty (S.T.E.P), the organization they founded after their 2005 visit to Vietnam, where they lunched with the former opposition and developed a plan for helping Vietnamese children by building a school. Elsewhere in Vietnam, they have built two more sc...