Miles Horobin (he/him) grew up in Sonoma County and spent much of his childhood exploring and getting to know the flora and fauna who inhabit this bioregion. His appreciation for the natural world is deeply inspired by his botanist grandfather, Alan. After spending many years immersed in gardening, farming, and landscaping, Miles came to OAEC in 2020 for the Garden Internship Program. In his current role as Garden Manager, he brings together many of his passions and skills and shares them with others. He is a lifelong learner and finds plants to be some of the best teachers. When he is not working, you can find him drinking tea, trail running, or transforming plants into various forms of food and medicine.
Our speaker for October 29, 2026 was Amanda Kitchens, co-founder and executive director of Our Village Closet (OVC), a Santa Rosa nonprofit. OVC supports foster youth (up to age 25) and their caregivers by providing free essential items, dignity-centered shopping experiences, and wraparound community support. Amanda and her husband Chad have been foster parents for 15 years and have adopted four children from foster care. Amanda is proudly neurodiverse, has a degree in anthropology, and is a long-time social scientist.
OVC was founded in 2019 by Amanda and her husband Chad. For the first two years, OVC collected donated items and distributed them from garages and storage units across the county. In 2021, the organization opened a dedicated resource center on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa. The center is designed as a boutique-style, free shop where foster youth and their caregivers can personally select the items they need. Available items include clothing, shoes, pajamas, underwear, hygiene products, books, toys, crafts, car seats (new only), and bikes. Seasonal programs include a back-to-school event with backpacks, lunchboxes, water bottles, and new shoes; a birthday gift program; and a December holiday gift event. Amanda illustrated the urgency of OVC's work through a vivid scenario: a caregiver receiving a call to take in a 7-year-old and a 3-month-old by 2:00 p.m. that same day. OVC exists to step into those critical moments by helping caregivers gather what they need and helping children feel seen, valued, and welcomed.
Amanda provided an overview of the local foster care system. Reunification to biological families is the primary goal of foster care. Adoptions have decreased as a result of greater investment in family stabilization and support. There has also been a rise in kinship placements, where close relatives or family friends step in to care for children. These caregivers have historically received less support than traditional foster parents. All resource parents, whether doing emergency fostering, concurrent planning (supporting reunification but open to adoption), or long-term fostering, undergo the same training. Children enter foster care primarily due to neglect (over 60% of cases). Reports are made to Child Protective Services (known locally as Family, Youth, and Children Services) by teachers, family members, or community members. In 2025, approximately 4,000 calls were made to the hotline in Sonoma County, resulting in roughly 71 new removals. As of 2025, there are approximately 471 foster children in Sonoma County.
OVC has also developed several programs to support the foster care community. The Adopted Youth Lounge is hosted at OVC's site in collaboration with TLC and serves teens and tweens adopted from foster care. OVC partners with Forget-Me-Not Farms Collaboration to offer therapeutic animal interaction sessions for foster and adopted youth. Community Adoption Conversations is open to the public with sessions held twice a year to educate and connect the community around adoption from foster care. OVC also actively works to expand educational resources and connection opportunities for caregivers to reduce placement disruptions. OVC operates with a staff of three with one full-time employee (Jennifer, Director of Operations) and two part-time staff including Amanda. The organization logged approximately 4,000 volunteer hours in the past year. The annual budget is approximately $300,000. OVC relies on individual donors, foundations, community groups, and volunteers; it receives no federal, state, or significant county funding. It recently raised $150,000 at its annual fundraiser.
Thank you, Jennifer, for the informative and thoughtful presentation and for all you do for our community.
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!
Help Kauaʻi recover, and you could win a week on the North Shore.
Help Kauaʻi recover, and maybe win a week on the North Shore. Hurricane Lowell struck Kauaʻi on September 7, damaging or destroying hundreds of homes and leaving much of the North Shore without power for weeks. Our fellow Rotarians of the Rotary Club of Hanalei Bay are raising $25,000 for relief through Vacation for Giving. Give $50 or more by November 20 for a chance at 6 days and 5 nights at The Cliffs at Princeville, round-trip airfare for two from the West Coast, a rental car, and dining certificates. Learn more and give: hanaleirotary.org/vacation-for-giving
Members of the International PolioPlus Committee seek to counter false narratives
by Etelka Lehoczky
21 Oct 2026
Rotary members who launched the effort to eradicate polio decades ago couldn’t have imagined that falsehoods about vaccines would one day spread unchecked on the internet. But today, online misinformation is a major barrier to finally eliminating this devastating disease.
“We read a lot of stuff on Facebook and other social media. One of the toughest things is [that] Facebook’s become totally unreliable as a source of real news,” says Michael K. McGovern, chair of the International PolioPlus Committee. “There’s so many fake pictures, so many staged events.”
Visit endpolio.org to learn facts about the disease, understand the major successes so far in the eradication effort, and donate to the fight.
Anti-vaccine propaganda on social media can be dangerous, says Valarie K. Wafer, co-chair of the International PolioPlus Committee. In Pakistan, she noted, the health workers who go door-to-door offering vaccinations have faced hostility and violence from parents who heard online that the health workers are peddling poison.
“We had one situation near Peshawar in Pakistan, it might have been eight years ago now, where [people] faked bad reactions to vaccinations,” says McGovern, a member of the Rotary Club of South Portland-Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA. “And it just takes hold because of social media. It takes years to overcome the memories, the thoughts, that those stories generate.”
There is some good news to report, particularly from Pakistan, the only country besides Afghanistan where cases of wild poliovirus are still found. Aziz Memon, chair of the Pakistan PolioPlus Committee, says the last three immunization drives targeted 45.2 million children each. And he cites “a remarkable improvement” in the environmental samples tested for the presence of poliovirus.
Memon, a member of the Rotary Club of Karachi, Pakistan, also says more effort is going into testing people who travel back and forth across the border with Afghanistan. The highly permeable border has long made it difficult to monitor the virus and reach unvaccinated people, but “those families are being tracked,” Memon says.
And yet, the information war continues. Not only does misinformation about polio and vaccinations continue to proliferate, but positive developments often don’t receive publicity. McGovern says even professional news outlets fail to report on the significance of the eradication effort and the broad support behind it.
“For five straight years, the U.S. government has appropriated US$265 million for polio eradication. If you read the news, you would never guess that,” McGovern said.
Countering anti-vaccine propaganda effectively is even more of a challenge.
“We need to point out the wrong information,” says Wafer, a member of the Rotary Club of Burlington Lakeshore, Ontario, Canada. “But I think we can do it in the context of positive messaging that also reinforces what we’re doing, instead of focusing on the negative stuff.”
She says people who want to fight misinformation should post to social media about their fundraising and other efforts, so there’s a strong alternate narrative. Rotary’s Brand Center features a range of multimedia resources to post online.
“It’s up to all of us to try to counter some of the negativity that we see with positive stories of what we’ve accomplished, because we have accomplished a lot,” Wafer says.
Wafer says the trust that people around the world have in Rotary comes, ultimately, from members joining the eradication effort in person. She remembers how, during her first National Immunization Day, she was at a village in India when someone handed her a four-week-old baby to give the vaccine drops to.
“It wasn’t me they trusted,” she says. “It was the Rotary emblem on the vest I was wearing. That trust is with all of our members, who are there every single day, alongside the frontline workers that are there. I’ve seen that firsthand.”
Rotary Club of Santa Rosa Sunrise - Founded June 30, 1986
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Marin Headlands
