Heather Irwin is the dining editor for Sonoma Magazine and the Press Democrat and the founder of BiteClub, which jabs an irreverent fork at the restaurant scene in Sonoma County. An avid eater and writer, she more than 16 years of experience covering local restaurants, chefs and food and has been a journalist for more than 25 years.
Heather is also the founder of Sonoma Family Meal, a disaster-based non-profit founded in the darkest hours of the 2017 Tubbs wildfire. Working directly with dozens of local chefs including Kyle Connaughton, Douglas Keane, a team of Stark reality restaurant chefs, and many others, SFM served more than 80,000 meals in the days, weeks and months after more than 5,000 homes were lost. During the pandemic, SFM served 250,00 meals in collaboration with 11 non-profit organizations to support vulnerable seniors, farm workers, families and those in quarantine and isolation. SFM supported local restaurants to prepare the food, paying out $1.7 million and keeping hundreds of restaurant workers employed. the organization has also recently built a 3,100 square foot emergency kitchen.
For that work, Heather has been a Jefferson Award Winner, Spirit of Sonoma Winner and was honored by the Community Child Care Council, among others.
She holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and has moved 36 times, settling in Sonoma County in 2003. Heather has two very quirky rescue dachshund that like to stare at her while laying on her pillow.
Tales From the Dark Side by Forensic Accountant Lorraine Aho
Our guest speaker for Thursday, July 21, 2022, was Lorraine Aho, of Aho & Associates. Lorraine is a CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner. She has over 20 years of experience as a fraud examiner, controller, and financial analyst. Her practice includes financial reconstruction and forensic financial investigations, including fraud, embezzlement, fiduciary misconduct, and financial elder abuse. Lorraine “follows the money” in a variety of matters, including divorce, bankruptcy, civil and criminal litigation, and private compliance. She is the designated “spaghetti untangler,” who is regularly called in to untangle thousands of financial transactions and get to the bottom of the age old question: “Where is my money?”
Lorraine’s early jobs (before she started a 25 year career in management) gave her a solid foundation for forensic accounting. In one job she worked for a wood worker who put fake advertisements in magazines to sell catalogues that didn’t exist so he could use the money for cocaine. She also worked for a bakery that the owners burned down for the insurance money! Lorraine says creativity and persistence are necessary for working in forensic accounting. Her task is often to “follow the money” to find out exactly what happened to missing money.
The fraud triangle has 3 sides: motivation, rationalization, and opportunity. You can’t do much about motivation and rationalization, but you can often limit a fraudster’s opportunity. The North Bay in particular is a high fraud arena; our lifestyles and the high cost of living often create the perfect motivation/rationalization for defrauding others. She puts forensic accounting cases into one of two buckets: litigation and reconstruction. Litigation usually involves allegations of fraud. Reconstruction is generally a bad set of books typically caused misunderstandings or lack of skill. Financial irregularities are often explained by the unavailability of competent accountants and bookkeepers and sometimes compounded by their attempts to cover up their own poorly developed accounting and overly complicated systems.
Thank you, Lorraine, for the fascinating stories from the dark side! You are both entertaining and frightening! Keep up the good work.
Click HERE to see the recording of Lorraine's talk. She has a lot of great stories. The recording is available for a limited time only.
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!
When I was a proofreader, I shared with my coworkers this example to illustrate how writing can skew based on gender: A professor wrote on the blackboard, “Woman without her man is nothing.” The students were then instructed to insert the proper punctuation. The men wrote, “Woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women wrote, “Woman! Without her, man is nothing.” —Susan Allen
Do you have a joke you would like to share? Send it the editor.
Although the island of Buyiga is located in a swamp adjacent to Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, its nearly 20,000 residents face a shortage of potable water; the island’s one private well regularly served only 10 percent of the population. Enter the Rotary Club of Rubaga Lake View, which teamed with Swedish Rotarians from District 2390 in an adopt-a-village effort. By late 2021, six boreholes had been sunk across Buyiga, providing water to a school and the island’s sole medical facility. Kristian Rankloo of the Rotary Club of Burlöv-Karstorp visited in 2019 through his charity Help at Hand, spurring him to solicit the $30,000 needed for the project from Swedish Rotary members and businesses, says Paul Kagga of the Rubaga Lake View club. “The community provided local materials like sand, bricks, and land. Our club was responsible for the monitoring, implementation, and evaluation,” Kagga says. Now the club is focused on raising $25,000 to expand Buyiga’s schools.
This story originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of Rotary magazine.
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Although the island of Buyiga is located in a swamp adjacent to Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, its nearly 20,000 residents face a shortage of potable water; the island’s one private well regularly served only 10 percent of the population. Enter the Rotary Club of Rubaga Lake View, which teamed with Swedish Rotarians from District 2390 in an adopt-a-village effort. By late 2021, six boreholes had been sunk across Buyiga, providing water to a school and the island’s sole medical facility. Kristian Rankloo of the Rotary Club of Burlöv-Karstorp visited in 2019 through his charity Help at Hand, spurring him to solicit the $30,000 needed for the project from Swedish Rotary members and businesses, says Paul Kagga of the Rubaga Lake View club. “The community provided local materials like sand, bricks, and land. Our club was responsible for the monitoring, implementation, and evaluation,” Kagga says. Now the club is focused on raising $25,000 to expand Buyiga’s schools.