Leroy Carlenzoli is a Merit Award winner this year for his years of community service and dedication to helping others. The celebration will be on Monday, Sept 21 at the Finley Community Center, Person Auditorium, at 5:30pm. Friends and family are welcome to join us in this great honor.
RSVP is required. I will coordinate the RSVP's and send the list to the City of Santa Rosa. If you would like to attend, please let me know by August 27th.
There is no cost, and there is no mention of a meal, so assume nothing or perhaps snacks.
We are lucky to have Leroy in our club, leading by example the wonderful humanitarian work he does hour after hour, day after day. Let's make sure all of Santa Rosa knows Santa Rosa Sunrise Rotary is 100% behind this amazing person!
Frances Lee (she/her) joined LandPaths in June 2026. She is a nonprofit fundraising and communications leader with 17 years of experience supporting youth development, arts education, and community-centered organizations across the Bay Area. Her previous experience includes leadership roles at Girls Leadership, Summer Search, MyPath, and Girls on the Run of the Bay Area. Frances has also worked as an independent consultant supporting nonprofits across the country with fundraising strategy and organizational planning. Through her consulting practice, she served as Executive Director of Little Opera and Development Director for the Young@Heart Chorus.
Frances’s connection to the outdoors began early through hiking and camping with her family, and at summer camps as both camper and counselor. Those experiences shaped her belief in the importance of equitable access to nature and outdoor learning opportunities.
Before her nonprofit career, Frances was a musician and teaching artist who taught piano, flute, and voice. She studied music education and flute performance at the University of Southern California and California State University, Los Angeles, and continues to sing in bands and choral groups.
Frances lives in West County with her partner and their dogs, Toby and Zoey. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, gardening, attending live music performances, and traveling with friends and family.
About LandPaths: LandPaths is an environmental education and conservation leader with the mission is to foster a love of the land in Sonoma County. We believe everyone should have access to the awe and inspiration of nature. Annually, we engage thousands of participants like in joyful, caring, and transformative relationship with the land. We do this mainly through creative outings led in both English and Spanish, environmental education, nature camps, and people-powered land stewardship of local open spaces.
Saving Lives Since 1975; Women's Recovery Services, presented by Caryn Shapiro Stone
Our speaker for September 10, 2026 was Caryn Shapiro Stone, the Development Director for Women’s Recovery Services. Caryn has 20 years of experience in non-profit work, a master’s degree in international relations from Golden Gate University, and is a graduate of UCSB. Caryn is also a certified life coach.
Women's Recovery Services (WRS), founded in 1975, is a Sonoma County nonprofit supporting women with substance use disorders and their children. WRS eliminates the barrier of childcare by allowing women to bring their children on-site or receive services while pregnant. The organization serves some of the most vulnerable members of the community: 64% of women entering the program are homeless, many face active court cases, and the vast majority have experienced significant trauma. WRS is a trauma-informed care facility with all staff trained to meet clients without judgment and with full recognition of their lived experiences. The organization provides a Residential Treatment Program including 90 to 120 days of substance dependency and mental health treatment at the main Santa Rosa campus accommodating approximately 18 women and 12 children on-site. The Children's Program is available to children living with or visiting their mothers and includes on-site childcare. WRS also operates a Transitional Living Program with 3 homes in Santa Rosa (Mission House, Hope House, and Sunrise House) where graduates can reside for up to 2 years while continuing their recovery. The Aftercare Program consists of 1 year of weekly meetings providing case management, community support, and continued accountability.
SRS is also piloting a 1-to-2-week intake phase designed to address immediate practical barriers, such as transportation, medical needs, legal issues, and basic rest, before formal treatment begins. Since 2016 42% of the women who entered completed the residential treatment program; 364 completed the residential treatment program; all of the 62 women who were homeless at program entry and completed the program had stable housing upon leaving WRS; 64% of program completers are drug and alcohol free 1 year after program entry; 45% are employed; and 14% are pursuing education post-program. Since 2020, WRS has undertaken significant facility upgrades, including the addition of communal spaces, an industrial kitchen, outdoor landscaping, a patio, and fresh paint throughout. WRS believes that dignity and peacefulness of the physical environment are integral to the recovery process and help women feel at home, take pride in their surroundings, and engage more fully in treatment. Caryn mentioned that Sunrise Rotary has been a longstanding and impactful partner of WRS. Since January 2014, the club has contributed $48,938 in cash donations to WRS - not including the value of volunteer hours (led by Leroy Carlenzoli) dedicated to maintaining and beautifying WRS' transitional homes and main campus. Club members, also coordinated by Leroy, have also helped to improve the physical environments of Mission House, Hope House, and Sunrise House.
Thank you to Caryn for the thorough presentation of WRS’ effectiveness and value to the community. WRS has been one of leading Sunrise Rotary’s most important and successful service and donations projects for many years and we remain committed to continuing our partnership with WRS in the future.
On a regular basis, our resident photo pro Warren Smith, submits pictures of what is going on at the weekly meetings. You can always find the most recent pictures at the websites photo journal called "Meeting Sighting" Please note that all the meeting photos for the entire Rotary year are at this location with the most recent on the last page.
Thanks for all the great pictures Warren!Link to Meeting Sightings. The most recent are on the last page!
Rootary International President Elect Larry Lundsford of Kansas USAcircle Eloise Tweeten and Jack Strange, District 5130 Governor Elect in Litchfield Park Arizona September 3-5 for the Big West Leadership Institute.
The zone leadership Institute provides guidance inspiration, and the networking magic which keeps the drive to serve, creative and fresh for all attending particularly District governor elects.
Apprehension, fear, trust. All the above are expressed in this young woman's face as she receives a vaccination for polio by next year's Rotary International president Larry Lunsford.
Rotary has always been about people. Not projects. Not numbers. People.
Our goal of reaching 1.25 million Rotarians and 125,000 Rotaractors by our 125th anniversary in 2030 is also about people.
I bring up this goal again not because I expect the number itself to move you. Numbers rarely do. I bring it up because I worry that a goal this large can begin to feel abstract, distant from the everyday work of our clubs. I do not want that to happen. So let us talk, once more, about what is truly behind it.
I want to offer your club a simple exercise. Look back over the last five to seven years and find your best year. Maybe it was a year new members arrived and, more meaningfully, stayed. Maybe it was a year your meetings became something members looked forward to, rather than another obligation on a crowded calendar. Find that year. Then I ask you to do better than your best.
This is not a call to outpace the club across town or the district next door. It is never meant to be a competition between Rotary members. It is, instead, an invitation to hold ourselves to our own highest standard — and to rise to meet it again.
Why does this 2030 membership goal matter enough to me that I keep returning to it? Because behind every one of those numbers is a person whose life could be changed by this organization, just as mine and yours have been changed by it. Rotary has given me friendships that have lasted decades, a sense of purpose I did not know I was searching for, and something that, in time, came to feel like an extension of my family. I suspect many of you understand this in your own lives, in your own way.
That life-changing experience is what we offer when we invite someone to join us. There are people in your communities right now who would find real meaning here if only someone thought to ask them. So tell them your story. Tell them honestly how Rotary changed you, not just about the projects you led or the funds you raised but about the person you became along the way. Those stories have a way of reaching people when little else does.
If we hope to Create Lasting Impact, the kind that resounds for generations, we will need more people standing beside us to help carry our work forward. Let us come together, not only this month but every month of every year, to make Rotary stronger, more joyful, and more like the family it has always been to me.
Find your best year. Then let us be better than our best, together.
You can find all prior "RI President's Messages" at this LINK
This month, I want to have some fun and do a little preplanning exercise for World Polio Day on 24 October. Are you with me?
Each year, World Polio Day gives us a moment to pause, reflect, and recommit to the promise Rotary made to the world that no child, anywhere, will ever again suffer the devastating effects of polio. This year, that moment feels especially powerful.
President Yinka has challenged all of us to “better our best,” and I want to echo that call with a challenge of my own. Look honestly at what your club has done to support polio eradication. If your efforts have been strong, stretch further. If your club has not yet engaged in our No. 1 corporate priority, begin now by making a gift of at least US$1,500 at endpolio.org/donate.
That single act of generosity will do much more than you may realize. Thanks to the Gates Foundation’s 2-to-1 match, every dollar becomes three. Together, we can reach our annual goal of $50 million and finish the job Rotary began.
Each step brings us closer to a world where polio exists only in history books.
But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Above all, polio eradication is a human endeavor — built on courage, compassion, and the belief that service can reshape the future.
On World Polio Day, I will be spending time in a place that symbolizes exactly that. It is a location unlike any I have ever visited, and I look forward to revealing it in real time on social media. I will be having a creative (and fun) time while using this as an opportunity to shine light on those whose work embodies Rotary’s highest ideals — health workers, volunteers, and community leaders who stand on the front lines of disease prevention.
Later this year, President Yinka and I will be traveling to Pakistan to meet with many of these leaders to express our personal gratitude. They are the reason we have come so far and must finish what we started.
As you prepare for World Polio Day, I ask you to join me in spirit and in action. Host an event. Tell the story of Rotary’s leadership. Invite your community to participate. Make your club’s gift. And above all, help us build momentum that carries into the months ahead.
And for all my puzzle-loving friends, here is a clue to my personal location on 24 October: “Polio with the _ E _ _ U _ _ S.”
You can find all prior "Messages from the Foundation Trustee Chair" at this LINK
Volunteers root out an invasive plant with a fiery nature
by Mary Catherine O’Connor
10 Sept 2026
As a kid in the 1960s, Don McEnhill could tell there was something different about the thick bamboo-like stands of vegetation he and his friends would crash through on their path to the Russian River. “You’d have no bugs on you. No spiders, no anything,” he remembers.
He didn’t know it at the time, but the lack of insects was a signal that this mysterious plant was not native to the northern California waterways around his family’s cabin in Healdsburg. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when he started working with Russian Riverkeeper and other local conservation groups, that he learned all about this invader, Arundo donax, commonly called the giant reed. It guzzles more water than any other plant on the river. It outcompetes native plants and trees. And it possesses another unwelcome attribute: In a region increasingly prone to wildfires, the giant reed is extremely flammable.
Winding for 110 miles through California’s wine country and redwood groves on its way to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian River is a treasured waterway for fishing and recreation. Boisterous partiers float down it in inner tubes. Daredevils fling themselves into it from rope swings. Churchgoers dressed in white baptismal garments dunk themselves in its waters. The vast watershed supports Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead trout and river otters. Its woodlands and grasslands are home to coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions.
Rotary clubs have partnered with conservationists to remove the invasive giant reed from parts of California’s Russian River watershed where it poses the greatest fire risk.
Rick Tang Photography
Seeking to protect this habitat, environmental groups have taken aim at the giant reed, a fast-growing perennial that can reach 30 feet in height. Rotary clubs across Sonoma and Mendocino counties have partnered with conservationists for the past few years, contributing volunteers and funds for equipment.
On a Saturday morning early this summer, about 30 Rotarians, Interactors, and other community members gathered along the river to root out Arundo donax. Fanning out across a section of river, the volunteers pushed through thick brush to slice through the stalks with loppers. Then others gathered up the piles of what looked like bundles of sugar cane to be fed into a wood chipper.
“It’s everywhere you look,” says Milo Kluse, a 16-year-old Interactor from Healdsburg. “It’s pretty crazy.” Kluse, the new president of the Interact Club of Healdsburg High School, says that the club has made good headway on reducing trash along the river and was in need of a new challenge. The Arundo was happy to oblige.
Russian Riverkeeper’s education and restoration director, Birkin Newell, pointed out a cottonwood tree and a willow on either side of a freshly cut giant reed stand. “These are the true native riparian tree species that we want to have here,” he says. Unlike Arundo, the tree canopies provide shade, keeping the water cool. “They provide great food and habitat for wildlife and the Arundo provides none of that. If you’re a deer, you can’t move through [it] to browse and eat.”
Outside its native ranges in the Mediterranean and Asia, Arundo donax has vexed land managers for decades. Spanish colonists likely brought the plant to what is now California in the 18th century. They “happily introduced it to the New World because it grows so fast. And back in those times, it was a really helpful building material,” explains McEnhill, who is now deputy director of Russian Riverkeeper. But its presence in this watershed is due to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which planted it decades ago as a means of reducing erosion, he says. It was one of the Corps’ ecologically unsound approaches to erosion control at the time, which also included burying crushed car bodies along riverbanks.
A single acre of Arundo along the Russian River can consume more than 7 million gallons of water each year, McEnhill says. The giant reed is also tenacious, gaining ground by sending underground stems called rhizomes laterally. Lop off one stalk and another will sprout from its stems. A cut shoot left on the ground can resprout a single node and start anew. One that falls into the water can take hold downriver, starting a new colony that could cover many acres before being discovered.
Reducing the wildfire hazard presented by the stands is a big motivator for the volunteers. Just about everyone here has either needed to evacuate due to a wildfire or knows someone who has. Some know people who have experienced even worse. Arundo is highly flammable and burns exceptionally hot. In 2019, the Kincade fire lasted 14 days; it consumed more than 77,000 acres, destroyed more than 370 homes and other buildings, and forced residents of Healdsburg and nearby towns to evacuate.
That fire crossed the Russian River in two places, McEnhill says. When he and other members of Russian Riverkeeper investigated those spots after the fire, the native plants looked to have mostly survived. “But then we saw these giant ash heaps and big black spots. Those were Arundo stands. They helped the fire jump across the river,” he says.
Around 30 Rotarians, Interactors, and other community members gather along the river to root out Arundo donax on a Saturday morning in June.
Rick Tang Photography
The next year, after a fire broke out near a stretch of the river in Healdsburg, the fire department became acutely focused on the giant reed, which had contributed to that blaze’s extreme heat. It burned so hot, the firefighters’ boots started to melt.
Linda Collister, who was then the town’s fire marshal, asked Russian Riverkeeper to help the department update its wildfire prevention plan by determining an environmentally friendly way to remove the stands that posed the greatest fire risk. That’s how the nonprofit began its concerted Arundo eradication efforts.
It focused its efforts on a 5-mile stretch of the river that threads around Fitch Mountain, a community of several hundred homes where the stakes couldn’t be higher. The main route through the area is a narrow two-lane road that was built in the 1920s. “It is the single highest risk area for human mortality in Sonoma County,” McEnhill explains. “If a fire gets going on that mountain, people will die.”
Down by the river, John Grech from the nearby Rotary Club of Sebastopol Sunrise couldn’t help but feel a little defeated. “So much of this was cut, but was never hauled out,” he says. “We’re cutting down the regrowth.” Amid dead reeds on the ground, pockets of green shoots have risen 4 or 5 feet in just a few months.
Volunteers cut down the giant reeds and haul them away to prevent regrowth.
Rick Tang Photography
After cutting the new growth, Newell and other Russian Riverkeeper staff swooped in with a bottle of a blue-tinted herbicide. They painted a small amount of the chemical on the nub of each freshly cut stalk sticking out of the ground.
Upstream, another group of Rotarians and Interactors hauled the last of their cut piles to the chipping site as the heat of the day built up. Many of them, including 17-year-old Lila Kreck, have joined past Arundo removal days. “It’s great to get the water-sucking non-native plants out of here,” she says. The increasing severity of wildfires has left an indelible mark on this community and her own family. “My grandparents’ house was like inches away from being burned,” she says.
The simple act of coming out to the river armed with a pair of loppers can give people here a way to channel their worries into action, says Barbara McChesney, a member of the Rotary Club of Windsor and chair of District 5130’s environmental committee. “It feeds your soul to do this kind of stuff.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.
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Rotary Club of Santa Rosa Sunrise - Founded June 30, 1986
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