Andy Werback is from China Lake, California, home of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. He and wife Sam call Sebastopol home.
Andy is an electrical engineering graduate of UC Davis and was a computer programmer – working on embedded computers for defensive avionics on fighter aircraft and microchips in the early days of WiFi.
His hobbies include history, particularly the US Navy in World War II. He was a docent and shipkeeper on the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien, a WWII Liberty ship based in San Francisco. He is a retired software engineer, worked on avionics for fighter aircraft and then the early days of WiFi.
His interest in World War II lead to doing research on the US Navy in the South Pacific, and that led to exploring the story behind the headlines – how did they maintain and repair ships far from existing facilities?
This led to doing research at the National Archives, building a model and exploring the local history of the Advanced Base Sectional Docks, a Wonder of World War II.
Angela Del Grande, Instructional Coordinator at Plumfield Academy
Our speaker for May 29, 2025, was Angela Del Grande, Instructional Coordinator and teacher at Plumfield Academy, a Sonoma County special education school. Angela has been in special education for 15 years, with the last 10 years at Plumfield. She has a master’s degree in education and, among other things, specializes in teaching math to Plumfield’s TK-12 grade students. Plumfield is a non-profit school founded in 1964 designed for the daytime treatment and education of children ages 3-12 for whom public education is not available due to their emotional, developmental, and learning needs. Plumfield is currently only for boy students.
Plumfield’s mission is to provide a transformative educational experience and enable students to thrive in a serene and enriching environment. There are over 9,000 students in Sonoma County with disabilities or other learning difficulties who are enrolled in some form of special education service. Plumfield serves all schools in Sonoma County and currently has 24 students. Local schools make 3-5 referrals of students to Plumfield every week. Plumfield’s students have complex needs that cannot be provided in Sonoma County’s public schools. The kids at Plumfield have disabilities such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, depression, and other specific learning disabilities. All of the kids have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Plumfield’s classes have 3-6 students, so the students receive very individualized instruction and assistance. Plumfield also provides a variety of clinical services, including counseling, family support, psychiatric support, speech and language therapy, and occupational therapy. Plumfield is currently building 2 new classrooms for early elementary students.
Many thanks to Angela for her presentation of Plumfield Academy, a local gem. You are doing great work and enriching all of Sonoma County!
This week in 2015 - Carolyn Anderson and Abigail Bridgman
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!
Jewish Community Free Clinic - finds Success with Works of the Heart Fundraiser
A wonderful Saturday evening was enjoyed at Sonoma Academy to raise money for all the amazing services the free clinic provides to anyone in our community who needs them - documented or not. Rotary was well represented. Credits to Marty Behr for organizing a table to be shared by Marina Gachet, Eloise Tweeten, Jack Strange, Lori Rodrigues, and Max and Venus Childs. We were entertained by live music, live auction, silent auction, art show and fed family style by Grossman's Noshery.
Harry and Judith Coffey were seen having a good time as well!
These days, it is not as common to wear membership pins out in public. A more common mode of identification is conversation. That is the activity that disclosed our common membership in Rotary this past weekend 3,000 miles away in Florida.
Mike and I started talking and soon discovered of our respective club's community food insecurity reduction efforts. My mouth was watering with curiosity and the providence emerging in the discussion. Mike is also a fisherman, and restoring his bass boat, where he lives less than a mile from the launching dock on the Caloosahatchee Waterway, offering fresh and saltwater species cuisine!
Visit, talk, fish and find new friends. The Magic of Rotary feeds many appetites!
Across our country, Rotarians have responded to the need for serving their local communities, particularly in response to food insecurity. Like Sunrise engagement with the food pantry FISH, the Rotary Club of Lehigh Acres in Florida serves holiday meals on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Take a look at how their involvement engages and garner's public support.
A duck walks into a store and asks, “Got any grapes?” The storekeeper says, “No.” The next day, the duck returns and asks, “Got any grapes?” The storekeeper replies, “No!” This continues for a week until the storekeeper says, “If you come in here again asking for grapes, I’ll nail your feet to the floor!” The next day, the duck comes in and asks, “Got any nails?” The storekeeper says, “No.” The duck grins, “Got any grapes?”
I have had so many wonderful experiences over the past year, but as comforting as it might be to dwell on the past, we must look toward the future.
We are closer than ever to ending polio, but that does not mean we can relax. We still have a promise to keep to the children of the world and their families, and we will only fulfill that promise through fundraising, advocacy, and the power of our collective action.
I was amazed at the capability and commitment of the peacebuilders at the Presidential Peace Conference earlier this year. Our Peace Fellowship program and our many other peace initiatives bring healing to a divided world, but they need our support to remain effective and relevant.
Amid a worldwide loneliness epidemic, Rotary offers friendship, purpose, and belonging. If we hold true to our ideals — to The Four-Way Test and our spirit of inclusivity — we will remain a beacon of light even in the darkest times.
The Action Plan can serve as a guide to make our clubs and districts simply irresistible, but it is up to us to take that advice and put it to use.
Family of Rotary, there is nothing we cannot achieve when we come together and work toward a common goal.
You are The Magic of Rotary, and I can’t wait to see the lasting change you bring to the world.
You can find all prior "RI President's Messages" at this LINK
This past year, my wife, Gay, and I have been privileged to witness the impact of The Rotary Foundation. From dialysis centers in India to environmental projects in Taiwan and educational initiatives worldwide, we have had a front-row seat to the life-changing results of your generosity. To see the work of our Foundation firsthand gives one a deeper understanding of Rotary’s power to transform lives by spreading peace, hope, and health.
In Bangkok, we saw a specialized life support machine for critically ill patients with lung and heart problems at a public hospital — only the second machine of its kind available to the city’s 11 million residents outside of private care. Funded through a global grant, this technology is saving lives because Rotary members saw a need and responded.
Everything Rotary accomplishes through the Foundation — Rotary Peace Centers, Programs of Scale, global and district grants — relies on a strong and growing endowment. This is The Magic of Rotary that you make possible through your generosity.
That is the reason I am so passionate about our goal to build the net assets and commitments of The Rotary Foundation Endowment to $2.025 billion by 30 June 2025. The Trustees set this goal in 2016, after exceeding earlier targets and recognizing the growing interest in endowed giving. Thanks to your extraordinary support — including gifts from the estates of members — the net assets and commitments of the Endowment have grown substantially and are within reach of our goal.
To contribute to the Endowment, talk with your endowment/major gifts adviser or your major gifts officer, or visit rotary.org/donate. Your generosity can help us reach our goal, which we will celebrate at the Rotary International Convention in Calgary this month.
The fruits of these gifts may not be seen for several years. We are planting trees — trees that will grow to fund Rotary Peace Fellows and scholarships, put an end to polio, support high-impact Programs of Scale and global grants, and allow our Annual Fund to spread more hope.
During my 40-year journey in Rotary leadership, The Rotary Foundation has always been at the core. From leading a Group Study Exchange team in 1986 to serving as district Foundation chair, trustee, RI president, and now as trustee chair, it has been the honor of a lifetime.
I am fortunate to have experienced and been inspired by the magic that you have created through your dedication, service, and action. Let us together continue planting trees that will provide fruit for generations.
You can find all prior "Messages from the Foundation Trustee Chair" at this LINK
A Rotary scholar uses technology as a force for good
By Nathaniel Reade
Like so many, Beth Simone Noveck found her mind swirling with questions during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: Was it safe to go outside? If she got food delivered, would she need to wipe down the packaging? Was she a bad mother for wearing pajamas all day or repeatedly feeding her son cereal for dinner? “Everyone, of every religion, class, and country, faced this incredible challenge,” she remembers. “There was a feeling of helplessness.”
In the midst of the uncertainty, Noveck drew on her twin interests in technology and government, cultivated during her time as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. As the chief innovation officer for the state of New Jersey at the time, she and her team quickly built a website with centralized COVID-19 information, a symptom tracker, an online form that inventoried supplies of medical and personal protective equipment, and another that coordinated donations of that equipment.
“It’s a core value of Rotary,” she says, “that people come together to serve their community, and that by working in groups you don’t have to be a superhero to do extraordinary things. As difficult as COVID was, and as much as I regret feeding my child cereal so often, I felt good that I could be useful and act.”
Beth Simone Noveck is in awe of the Rotary members who made it possible to attend Oxford. “I am so grateful,” she says.
Courtesy of Northeastern University
Noveck grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, on a former chicken farm that her mother’s parents, refugees from Germany, started in 1937. She recalls a childhood of cats and trees and bare feet in the dirt, the earthy smells of cut grass and damp soil, picking flowers and canning vegetables. The chickens were gone by then, but her family still grew vegetables for themselves and to sell. “At age 4, I was made the VP of a business called the Greener Thumb,” she says, “which meant sitting on the front lawn and selling tomatoes.”
She learned early on about technology. Her father, a rabbi, was retired, so her mother became the principal earner, not only selling vegetables but trading stocks preinternet. Noveck grew up with the mechanical click-clack of a ticker-tape machine. Her mother then started a travel agency and in 1982 brought home a magical new thing called an IBM personal computer. Thus began Noveck’s love of technology, which she has melded into her other interests ever since.
That computer, Noveck says, “enabled my mother to raise two kids, cook three meals a day, earn a living, and also engage with the wider world far beyond where we lived. So in my experience it was a significant tool of empowerment.”
Noveck’s grandfather was a Rotarian. In college at Harvard, she heard about and applied for an “extraordinarily generous” Rotary Foundation scholarship to study abroad for a year, which she says was “so formative for my career and the work I do.”
The scholarship sent her to the University of Oxford in England in 1992, and she studied political science and democratic theory. She remembers great discussions and making friends from around the world with whom she remains close.
Noveck is still in awe of the many Rotary members whose contributions made her experience possible. “I went to college on a scholarship and could never have afforded Oxford, so this kind of experience for a whole year allowed me to really go in-depth into the work I started there,” she says. “My historical study of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and ’30s allowed me to investigate why some countries are able to maintain democracy, and why others crumble into fascism.”
Beth Simone Noveck
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, University of Oxford, 1992-93; PhD, University of Innsbruck, 1994; law degree, Yale University, 1997
Deputy chief technology officer and White House Open Government Initiative director, U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2009-11
Professor, director of the Burnes Center for Social Change, and director of the Governance Lab, Northeastern University, 2021-present
After Oxford, Noveck earned a PhD at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and a law degree at Yale. She clerked for a year in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, while also managing the team that built a software program called Unchat, which promoted “democratic deliberation and distance learning.”
For two years she served in the White House under President Barack Obama, leading the White House Open Government Initiative to make the government more transparent and participatory. She has published three books and numerous articles, and she’s had professorial stints at Yale, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She is now a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change as well as the Governance Lab.
Noveck points out that trust in government has dropped precipitously over the decades since President Ronald Reagan’s famous quote, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” She says that government can use new technologies, including artificial intelligence, to improve its responsiveness to people’s needs. She ticks off successful examples: programs and apps that have streamlined food-assistance applications, eased job searches, and reduced cardiac deaths by alerting people trained in CPR to a cardiac emergency nearby.
Much of her current work involves teaching young people skills to use technology to improve the world. Her former students have created apps that helped people experiencing domestic abuse and taught information technology job skills to refugees. As Noveck said in a TED Talk, “When we start by teaching young people that ... we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that’s when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards ... this open government revolution.”
“I am so grateful to Rotary for their support,” she says. “It provided me with opportunities, new vistas, a sense of purpose, and an ethos of service. It was extraordinary.”
This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.
The IT Professionals Fellowship is dedicated to fostering innovation, education, and ethical practices in the digital age.
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