Tom Jacobs presented the Adams School Family Recognition Award to John Peltz. John has been volunteering with Adams School for the past 6 years, since his two daughters started as students at the school. He is very knowledgeable, has been called upon quite often for his ‘fix-it’ skills, and is always there to answer the call.

 

Kelly Fresch, Adams School Principal, also spoke on how invaluable John’s volunteer work has been and how much it means to her and to the school as a whole. Kelly also spoke to the group about a few updates at Adams. Plans are in the works to get a banner put up at the school to commemorate the 30+ years of partnership between the Santa Barbara North Rotary Club and Adams School. She also mentioned that this past year Adams School won the California Distinguished School Award, one of only about 570 schools in the state of California to receive such an award. Additionally, Adams is being recognized with a 2018 National ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) Distinguished School award—one of only two schools nominated by the state of California, and one of only 100 schools nationwide which will receive this honor—and will be recognized at a ceremony in Kansas City next week!

 

We also had a special interview with our newest member, Irene Kelly. Mark Gallo moderated as Irene told us a bit about her early years in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico and Mexico City, and how she went to Salt Lake City, Utah to attend college at the University of Utah studied Finance and Entrepreneurship. After college, Irene stayed in Salt Lake City for about 8 years, working in various financial areas. This included a summer internship in Nepal working on micro-finance, which started her in the direction of social finance. She then started working with a non-profit group called Choice Humanitarian, which is also where she was first exposed to Rotary International (as the two organizations were partnering on multiple projects). While with Choice, she helped open a small donor-advised fund where some funds were able to be allocated to help small entrepreneurs start their own businesses in those countries where Choice was doing humanitarian work. After her partner got a job in Santa Barbara, and after she visited and saw how much it reminded her of her home town in Mexico, she moved out here and has been in Santa Barbara for the past 2 years. After leaving Choice to move to Santa Barbara, she missed the service component of that work, and so she looked up local Rotary groups and found ours. She credits the songs with her decision to join SB North Rotary Club (great work Blas!).

 

About 4 years ago, she started Spread The Love (http://www.spreadtheloveinc.org/about), an organization that provides financial education and nutrition content. She is passionate about financial education and would like to work through Rotary to bring this type of resource to the community. She currently works at Edward Jones as a Financial Advisor and also teaches yoga classes (“Yoga for Beginners”, Tuesday mornings, 8am, at “Yes Dance!” dance studio in Paseo Nuevo and everyone’s invited!).