This past Tuesday, we changed up our meeting location and joined the South East Edmonton Seniors Association (SEESA) for lunch. They meet in what was at one time, a Catholic Elementary School building, that shared the school yard with Holyrood Public School (which is still in use). We ate lunch in their cafeteria along with their usual lunchtime crowd.
We heard from Kim Beuhler, their Executive Director, who gave us a brief introduction to SEESA and the programs that they offer. SEESA was founded in the late nineties by a group of neighbourhood people who were concerned that the school, which was set to be sold to Arch Greenhouses, would be attracting too much traffic to their neighbourhood. The Seniors Association, has become a very popular neighbourhood hub, with almost fifteen hundred members, which definitely attracts more traffic all year round than the greenhouse ever would have! This seniors association has an official outreach area that takes in all neighbourhoods south of the river, north of the Whitemud and east of 99 St, although they also accept members from outside this range.
Membership is currently thirty dollars per year with extra fees charged for their various activities. They offer many different types of services and programs for seniors. They are a community hub for Meals on Wheels drivers. They have a Home Supports Services Co-ordinator who vets and then can recommend local businesses that offer many different types of home maintenance and cleaning services. They have a cafeteria that serves a hot breakfast (for seven dollars) and lunch (for ten dollars) five days a week, as well as other smaller items to anyone who wants to drop in. They also have a library, a gymnasium, a woodworking room, a pool room with several pool tables, and several more classrooms which are used for all kinds of clubs and classes. The building is open from morning to evening five days a week, with all kinds of clubs, drop in activities and classes going on at any one time. Their most popular classes are the fitness classes, which range from Cardio Salsa, Fitness for Life, Clogging, Yoga for Men, Line Dancing, Pickle Ball and Nordic Pole Walking, to Soft Pilates, Ballroom Dancing and many more. They have music classes, choirs, clubs for Guitar players, Bridge, Cribbage, Table Tennis, Toastmasters, Knitting, Quilting, Wood Carving, and many more. They also offer courses on using your iPad, managing investments, estate planning, creating your own cook book, and elder abuse, among many others.
One project involves giving medical students a look at what life is like for a healthy senior, as opposed to the patients they see in hospital. They partner with the U. of A. Medical School to give all fourth year medical students one day in the center. They host one or two students each day, give them a tour and then let them join in on which ever activities they would like. They soon learn that they can barely keep up with these seniors and often get their buts quite soundly kicked by someone in their eighties, at the various sports.
Another project they currently have is the neighbourhood bench program, which started a few years ago when Kim heard about this type of program and decided to try it herself. She got her brother in law to build her a bench, painted it up brightly and chained it to a tree in her front yard. It was such a hit with her neighbours that she decided to expand the project. The association applied for and received a grant of twenty five hundred dollars to produce twenty three benches that were placed all over the Holyrood neighbourhood, on the boulevard, with a home owner to make sure the bench is looked after and accessible all year round. They then started making the benches for sale to people who were willing to look after them and it has burgeoned into quite a popular project, with seventy eight benches sold so far, for one hundred dollars each. The bench comes unpainted, with a gift certificate to pay for paint, a chain and a padlock. The purchaser must sign an agreement to place it on their street and to look after it.
One day in the cafeteria Kim overheard a lady tell someone that if it was not for SEESA, she would have killed herself. She lived nearby and her husband had recently passed away. She felt very alone and isolated. Then one day she came for a meal at SEESA. As Kim said in closing, you should never under estimate the power of a meal. You never know what changes in someone’s life, providing a cup of coffee, or a meal for someone can achieve.
The "final" version of the weekly duty schedules have been posted to the Club Documents area of the website. There is one schedule for Door Duty and a separate schedule for Setup Duty.
The "final" version of your schedule has minor changes from the draft version circulated recently, so please open the schedule and make a note of your scheduled dates now. Use the link for "View Club Documents" in the Member Area.
A copy of each schedule is also attached for your convenience. In future, you can find the schedule on the website. Updates to the schedule will only be posted online.
The schedule is "final" in the sense that from now on, you are carrying the ball. You are expected to find a replacement or make other arrangements if you are unable to make a date on which you are scheduled.
Remember that the prior schedule has been revoked. The information given in the most recent Bulletin is now incorrect. If you allow me to save myself separate emails, the following people are NOT expected to serve as originally scheduled:
Oct 3 -- Heather de Kok, Bob Sandercock, Hans Pilz and Eric Solash
Oct 10 -- Les Cyrynowski, Hal Quilliam, Don Wedman, Hans Granholm
Oct 17 -- Rick Harcourt, Vi Hughes, Diana Parker and Ken Sutley
Instead the following people are scheduled:
Door Duty
Oct 3 Ken Sutley and Diana Parker
Oct 10 Augie Annicchiarico and Dimitri Papanicolas
Oct 17 Heather de Kok and Eric Solash
Setup Duty
Oct 3 Brenda McCullough and Ron McCullough
Oct 10 Ron Brown and Nicolle Germain
Oct 17 Campbell Chow and Ron Brown
Starting tomorrow, I will be sending out reminder emails to all four members involved with weekly duties. I am going to try something new and send out both a short term reminder and a long term reminder a couple of weeks before your scheduled date.
Whew! The hard part is done and we have a new duty structure for the remainder of this year. Still to come is updating and publishing the instructions for both door and setup duty and training and assisting the new door duty volunteers.
I want to thank all of you for your cooperation and willingness to work with me for the good of the Club. I was gratified by the response, especially having 16 people step up for door duty, and how readily the "snow birds" agreed to serve when they could. Frankly, it reminds me of what I like about Rotary and why I've been a Rotarian for so long -- the rest of you. You set a wonderful example of Service Above Self.
Arch would like to invite all Strathcona Rotarians to attend this free event . We hope many Rotarians will decide to support Arch by becoming a “Friend of Arch”. Anyone who wishes to dupport us can contact me and I will add thein name to the Friends list.
Our Rotary group has partnered in a joint venture with the Rotary Club of Pretoria to help raise funds for the New Hope School in Pretoria. Patrick Gibson has put together a presentation that he will be making to the other rotary clubs in our area to encourage them to help us with this venture. Our goal is to put enough funding in place for us to be able to apply for a Rotary International matching grant.
Patrick gave us the same presentation he will be making to other local rotary groups. It included a short introduction on the New Hope School, followed by a video that has been prepared by the New Hope School. The New Hope School has been one of the projects of our club for some years now, and most of our members are well aware of the work they do in schooling for handicapped children in the Pretoria area. They provide many services above and beyond the usual schooling activities, such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and many others, as needed by their students.
They receive only basic funding from the local government, so must fundraise to provide these other services. Some of the specific projects our funds could be used for would be a specialised playground, or programs to provide technical skills such as kitchen skills, nail and hair salon skills and sewing skills. Patrick has also put together a ‘Go Fund Me’ page on the web, on which people can get more information, view the video and make contributions. We will also be adding a link on our Rotary web page to this site.
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