Our guest for September 27, 2018 was Adam Peacocke of Rebuilding Our Community Sonoma County (ROC Sonoma County).  Adam’s general topic was a discussion about Sonoma County fire relief and, more generally, how events such as our October 9, 2017 fire do not go away after the initial problems are ‘resolved.’  Experts says that communities facing major disasters such as ours usually take between 5 and 10 years to recover.  Once the initial disaster is dealt with, disillusionment and compassion fatigue may set in and people often stop dealing with the long-term problems.  That’s where Adam comes in!

ROC Sonoma County works collaboratively within a community network of governmental agencies, churches, and other community groups to address long-term recovery needs related to the October Fires.  ROC also works with other communities to determine the best ways to collaboratively deal with disasters, that is, how to coordinate all of a community’s resources to deal with disaster, and to be prepared to use those resources before the disaster occurs.  As Adam said, we need a system of collaboration amongst the various resource groups in our communities.

Adam mentioned that the “footprint” of the disaster and the fire are different.  There is a “hazard event” (the fire) and a “disaster” (the long-term problems).  The hazard event occurs but the “disaster” remains, long past the period of compassion.  For example, the fire did not cause our housing shortage, but it did exacerbate it.  Adam believes that the housing shortage will continue to get worse long after the fire as, for example, landowners tend to remain in the ‘second-homes’ they moved into after the fire, evicting renters who are now less able to find housing.

One of the most notable programs run by ROC Sonoma County so far was the “Inspiring Hope” project in which the community came together for a weekend and built over 100 temporary living sheds.  These sheds are a valuable short-term solution for those who lost their homes in the fire.  This is an example of what a well-coordinated, multi-faceted community organization can do.

Our Sunrise hats are off to Adam and ROC Sonoma County.  They are doing great work.  If you are interested, check out their website at www.rocsonomacounty.org.  Well done Adam and many thanks for showing us the way!

On a regular basis, our resident photo pro Warren Smith  submit 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!

There are about 100 people at a June meeting of the Rotary Club of Holland, Michigan, and it’s a boisterous crowd because half of them are 12 years old.

“Let’s hear it for the red team!” A dozen middle school students jump up. The room erupts in applause.

The students pass around a microphone and introduce themselves. They are participants in the club’s Leaders for the 21st Century program, a three-day camp for incoming seventh graders. As a part of the program, the students – who have been identified by their teachers as emerging leaders – attend the club’s lunchtime meeting.

Rotarians Russ Miller, from left, Kathy DeVries, Bob Armour, and Wendy Piper from the Holland, Michigan, area.

Photo from: Frank Ishman

“We believe in starting leader-ship training early,” says Wendy Piper, president-elect of the Holland club. “We tell them about Rotary’s Four-Way Test and the importance of being involved in the community. Our hope is that they become involved in Interact, Rotaract, and eventually Rotary.” Participant Sarah Sanderson, who completed the program in 2000, even went on to become a Rotary Peace Fellow.

The club meets every Thursday at the Haworth Inn on the campus of Hope College. “For some of these kids, this is their first time on a college campus,” says Russ Miller, who was 2017-18 president of the club.

Bob Armour, a local educator, worked with several local Rotarians, including Tom DePree, a member of the Holland club, to launch the leadership program in 2000. “This training is the beginning,” Armour, a member of the nearby Rotary Club of Zeeland, tells the students. “You take this with you.” The Zeeland club is a joint sponsor of the program.

After they start seventh grade, the kids are asked to take on a variety of leadership roles at their schools. “Maybe they are assigned to help a child who is being bullied or someone with language difficulties,” says Miller. “It’s a great experience for these kids,” adds Piper. Once they reach high school or college, graduates of the program can serve as counselors to younger participants. 

As its name suggests, this town has a strong Dutch influence. Albertus Christiaan van Raalte, a minister who led a group of settlers from the Netherlands to the area, established the town in 1846. It’s home to an actual, working Dutch windmill (the last the Netherlands allowed to be exported, in 1964) and a wooden shoe factory. And every spring, 5 million tulips bloom and 500,000 tourists arrive to celebrate everything Dutch. Reader’s Digest named Tulip Time America’s best small-town festival.

Church membership is another important part of life here, with both the Reformed Church in America and Christian Reformed Church based in the area. “It’s a fairly conservative place,” Miller says. “Tulip Time is about as wild as we get.”

Beyond local projects like sponsoring park benches on scenic Windmill Island and several Little Free Libraries around town, the Holland club also participates in international projects.

“We’re working on our second global grant project in the past three years,” Miller says. The current project, in Kenya, focuses on improving farming practices, something that member Kathy DeVries, who chairs the project, knows a lot about. “My great-grand-parents emigrated from the Netherlands. They were typical crop farmers before my family switched over to perennial flower farming,” DeVries says.

“The project helps dairy farmers switch from grazing cattle and walking them to a river, to having the food come to them,” she says. “In a culture of scarcity, they feed the cows just enough to keep them alive [in Kenya]. But when cows go to the river, they overgraze the same path again and again. They become stressed. Their calves don’t survive. The whole enterprise is unsustainable.”

In 2012, DeVries visited a Dutch pastor with a hobby farm in Kenya. “The pastor had grown up on dairy farms in the Netherlands,” she says. He started letting his neighbors in Kenya borrow his equipment and teaching them to make silage – a type of fermented feed that can be stored for months in airtight containers. Because the feed is more nutritious than dried maize, the cows’ milk production increases and more calves survive.

Several years after that visit, the Holland club partnered with the Rotary Club of Eldoret-Uasin Gishu, Kenya, on a $62,500 global grant to fund a tractor and a training program for a village. “The pastor’s program was kind of the pilot,” DeVries says. The funding now affords every dairy farmer in the village the opportunity to learn to make silage at a demonstration farm.

Keeping its commitment to serving area youth, the club offers scholarships for area teens who want to join Rotarians participating in projects abroad. “We’re seeing a rise of ethnocentrism in the world,” Armour tells the middle school students at the Leaders for the 21st Century program. “But not among Rotarians. They maintain a global perspective.”

– Vanessa Glavinskas

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