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Rotary: People of Action

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As a global network that strives to build a world where people unite and take action to create lasting change, Rotary values diversity and celebrates the contributions of people of all backgrounds, regardless of their age, ethnicity, race, color, abilities, religion, socioeconomic status, culture, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Rotary will cultivate a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture in which people from underrepresented groups have greater opportunities to participate as members and leaders.

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Our club meets Friday mornings from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM at the Mequon Public Market, 6300 W Mequon Rd, Mequon, WI 53092. 
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Club Meeting Information
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

When: We meet Friday mornings from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM.

Where: Our next meeting is Friday (5/20) will be at the Mequon Public Market, 6300 W Mequon Rd, Mequon, WI 53092.

Program: Our program this week will feature Danika Tramburg. Danika is the Marketing Communications Manager at Kapco.

The greeter will provide either the thought, a Rotary minute, share a family moment or a cultural tradition ... anything they would like to start off the day positive.

Upcoming "It's your Rotary moment" assignees:

  • Tom Martin (5/20)
  • Steve Peterman (5/27)
  • Kay Newell (6/3)
  • Steve Peterman (6/10)

Note: If you are unable to act as "It's your Rotary moment" assignee when scheduled please arrange for your replacement.

Visit our website at mtsunriserotary.org.

Thought of the Week
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth. - Jim Harrison

Mel’s Charities to debut River Run
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

Fundraiser to feature 13.25 mile canoe/kayak trip

By Conley Publishing Group

FREDONIA — Mel’s Charities, already widely known for its successful Mel’s Pig Roast, BC’s 8-Pin Tap, Lollapalooza, Pig Scramble Golf Outing and more, is adding another event to its fundraising family.

Mel’s River Run will be held May 28 and is a family friendly trip down the Milwaukee River via canoe or kayak. The approximately 13.25-mile trip starts at Waubedonia Park in Fredonia and ends at Veterans Park in Grafton. Registration and loading starts at 7:30 a.m., with paddles in the water at 9 a.m.

Participants must bring their own canoe or kayak.

The run can take three to four hours to complete and participants are advised to bring plenty of water. This is not a race, but an opportunity to take a scenic trip for a good cause.

Since 1999, Mel’s Charities has awarded more than $1.6 million to dozens of charities, with a strong emphasis on human services, special needs and memorial scholarships.

The cost of the River Run is $20 in advance and $40 the day of the event.

Since the event will take place on Memorial Day weekend, Mel’s is hosting two patriotic contests: bestdressed individual and bestdressed canoe/kayak.

To register, see the River Run route or for more information, go to https://givebutter. com/2022MelsRiverRun.

This is an UNTIMED, family-friendly river run. Bring your own canoe or kayak. This is not a race, we just want everyone to enjoy their time on the Milwaukee River. When you reach Veteran’s park in Grafton, Mel’s will be waiting for you with beverages, and food to enjoy!

Lessons in generosity from rural Africa
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

By Helene Dudley, past president of the Rotary Club of Coconut Grove, Florida, USA

My eyes filled with tears as I attended  a Zoom meeting of the Yumbe, Uganda provisional Rotary Club discussing a service project they were planning to help a nearby village. I reached out in chat to another participant of the meeting who admitted she too was tearing up. The club is not yet officially recognized by Rotary International and the women are well below the poverty line but they are already doing service projects.

The 22 members of the Yumbe provisional Rotary Club are all leaders of Women’s Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) groups receiving funds from TCP Global to increase their loan pools. With regular loans to improve their businesses, their incomes increased so they can keep their kids in school and provide three meals a day.

Feeling they are already blessed by their regular access to loans (averaging $150), they decided their first service project should help a less fortunate community. After soliciting proposals from nearby villages, they opted to build latrines for a community that lacks sanitation.

I am continually surprised and sometimes shamed on my Zoom calls with Africa. I underestimate. I never stopped to question my initial assumption that VSLAs, made up of market vendors and subsistence farmers, lacked capacity for or interest in community projects.

Read more...
A Rotary LOL Moment
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

A little bit of salt
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

A surgeon in Spain finds a way to treat patients in Nigeria

by Steve Almond

Even as a child growing up in Owerri, Nigeria, Dr. Nnamdi Elenwoke had a penchant for surgery. “I remember my mom would buy a chicken for us to eat, and she would ask me to prepare it for cooking,” he says. “I would cut into the bird very carefully, trying to understand its insides. My mom got mad at me for wasting time, but gradually she realized that I was doing this for a reason.” As a teenager, Elenwoke was taken to a nearby hospital to visit a family friend. He promptly wandered away from his mother to see patients on a nearby ward, feeling an instinctual desire to heal them.

With his family’s support, Elenwoke, 39, attended medical school and now works as a neurosurgeon in Barcelona, Spain. He still goes back to Nigeria to perform surgeries when he can, but his desire to help patients and doctors in his homeland prompted Elenwoke in 2016 to help launch Docotal Health, which uses an international community of doctors to remotely help patients in underserved parts of the world.

Sometimes, this consists of Elenwoke dispensing medical advice directly to a patient via email or video chats. Just as often, Docotal offers support to health professionals on the ground. “Our community of doctors has different specialties,” he explains. “We have a cardiologist who can help if there is heart pain, a radiologist who can read X-rays and scans. Our core group consists of 11 doctors, but each of us has our own network we can reach out to.”

Elenwoke’s devotion to service dates back to his teenage years in Nigeria, where he joined Interact, following in the footsteps of his brother-in-law, a longtime Rotarian. Rotary and Docotal recently collaborated on a campaign to provide personal protective equipment for health workers in Nigeria, and future projects are in the works.

“To be successful,” Elenwoke says, “you have to surround yourself with a team that helps you succeed. You also need ‘a little bit of salt,’ which means a little bit of luck. For me, finding Rotary, having them as part of my team, has been that little bit of salt.”

Mequon Nature preserve with Interact
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 18, 2022

Homestead Interact students hike and learn iNaturalist app. (Photo: Dean Johnson)

iNaturalist is a social network for sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. The primary goal is to connect people to nature, and the secondary goal is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters.

iNaturalist helps you identify plants and animals with visually similar suggestions and verification by dedicated contributors. Get connected with a community of over a million scientists and naturalists who can help you learn more about nature! By recording and sharing your observations, you'll create research-quality data for scientists working to better understand and protect nature.

Registration Is Open - 2022 Rotary Ride
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 12, 2022
Working with Habitat to provide a place to live
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 11, 2022

By Randy Bretz, Rotary Club of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

A woman from Africa and her six children will soon have a new home in Lincoln, Nebraska, thanks to our Rotary club and Habitat for Humanity of Lincoln.

Construction will begin soon on the home for Martha and her children, giving them a place to live that isn’t cramped and even with a yard for the family to enjoy. Martha’s salary can only afford a two-bedroom apartment, but with the help of nearly $40,000 from our club, Habitat for Humanity will be able to construct a three-bedroom home on a lot in Lincoln that she can afford to buy.

The co-chairs of our annual fundraiser, Rise.Shine.Give, were overwhelmed at the support and donations that came in. Kate Holman and Penny Johnston note that sponsorships, silent auctions, and a lottery drawing resulted in more than $86,000 raised at our event on 12 February. After a year off because of COVID-19, nearly 150 people gathered at Nebraska Innovation Campus for the event.

We have a custom of donating half of the money raised to a charity of the club president’s choice. Club president Christina Usher said she selected Habitat because “it is an organization that is focused on building community and helping provide affordable housing.”

Read more...
Rotary Projects Around the World - United States
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 11, 2022

Editors Note: This is one in a series of articles highlighting Rotary projects around the world.

The Rotary Club of Collierville, Tennessee, treated hundreds of children with special needs and their families to a complimentary evening of hot-air balloon rides, food, and activities. The event, held on the eve of the Bluff City Balloon Jamboree, had 80 helpers across seven clubs in District 6800 (Tennessee and Mississippi). 

The clubs generated $30,000 in donations to cover the expense. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime event for a special-needs child,” says Dave Rhylander, a member of the Collierville club. “Just how many children in general have been on a tethered balloon ride? Roughly 300 kids got an opportunity to do that.” 

For September, the club is planning a riff on a TV show about high school football as another event for children with special needs. “We’re having our own Friday Night Lights for them this year,” Rhylander says.

Is it bias or is it bigotry?
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 11, 2022

by Louis Greenstein

Most of us associate the word "bias" with bad things like racism, sexism, and homophobia. 

To social scientists, however, those things go beyond bias; they're bigotry. Social scientists define bias as a preference, and without it, well, imagine how long it'd take you to place an order in a restaurant. 

Psychologist Matt Grawitch, director of strategic research at Saint Louis University's School for Professional Studies, says our brains evolved to make decisions quickly, based on small amounts of information. And in prehistoric times, experts believe that the more someone seemed like us, the less dangerous we assumed them to be, whether or not this was true. 

But many of our prehistoric tendencies aren't necessarily good for us today. Studies have shown that the most diverse companies are more likely to outperform their competitors. And you may have a bias toward burgers and against vegetables, but that doesn't mean you should only eat burgers or hate vegetables. 

Part of being a modern, evolved human or organization might mean avoiding some of the things we're biased toward and seeking out alternatives.

While we are often bad at spotting our own biases, we can learn to distinguish bias from bigotry and keep it from negatively affecting our decisions. 

Here are some tips for keeping bias from becoming a detriment. 

Read more...
Celebrating Arbor Day
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 05, 2022
Mequon students No. 1 at prestigious international math competition
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 04, 2022

By Conley Publishing Group

MEQUON — They are National Merit Scholarship finalists and were already one of the top competitive math teams in the country last week, when four Homestead High School students recently took the top spot in a prestigious international math competition. Adam Garsha, Jacob Schmidman, Eric Wan and Ethan Wang were among nearly 2,700 students working in 612 teams, who participated in this year’s MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), a prestigious competition that demonstrates the importance of math in everyday life.

The team of four 11th- and 12th-graders took home the top prize of $20,000 in college scholarships, out of the total $100,000-plus being awarded, after being chosen as winners during the final event in New York City April 25.

Thousands of high school juniors and seniors across the U.S. and six students from the U.K. vied for distinction in this year’s MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge. The competition was judged by an international panel of Ph.D.-level mathematicians.

The 2022 M3 Challenge saw students spend 14 consecutive hours in late February using mathematical modeling to solve a real-world problem by collecting data and creating models, developing insight on the problem and submitting their solutions online.

This year’s competition asked students to use math modeling to predict the future of remote work, analyzing the percent of jobs that are remote-ready and whether workers in those jobs will be willing or able to work remotely, then determining the percentage of workers who will go remote in a given city or metro area.

Read more...
Staff Corner: John Hewko
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 04, 2022

General Secretary and CEO of Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation

Photo Credit Monika Lozinska

In this monthly column, we introduce readers to the talented staff members at Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation, many of whom work behind the scenes at RI headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, and in six offices outside the United States. This month, we feature John Hewko, General Secretary and CEO of Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation.

  • Holds a law degree from Harvard University, a master’s in modern history from the University of Oxford (where he studied as a Marshall Scholar), and a bachelor’s in government and Soviet studies from Hamilton College in New York
  • Speaks five languages — English, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian
  • Served as the vice president for operations and compact development at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. government agency, where he negotiated foreign assistance agreements totaling $6.3 billion for 18 countries in the areas of infrastructure, agriculture, water and sanitation, health, and education
  • He and his wife, Marga, are Major Donors to The Rotary Foundation
Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin have opened a community hospital in Mequon
Posted by Steve Lettau on May 04, 2022

By Eddie Morales - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network opened a community hospital in Mequon on May 2.

The new hospital, across the street from the Froedtert & MCW Mequon Health Center, at 11421 N. Port Washington Road, will aim to provide “high quality care in an inviting, streamlined setting close to home when sudden needs arise,” according to a news release from Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin.

“We are proud to announce the opening of our fourth community hospital within our health network which expands our ability to provide access to care in more communities with an easy to navigate footprint,” said Cathy Jacobson, president and chief executive officer of Froedtert Health, in a statement.

“Our newest community hospital in Mequon supports our mission by providing access to academic medicine for the diverse communities we serve,” Jacobson added.

Mequon joins New Berlin, Oak Creek and Pewaukee in having its own small-scale Froedtert & MCW hospital.

The 17,000-square-foot Mequon hospital is open 24 hours a day and features a seven-bed emergency department with eight inpatient beds and includes laboratory, pharmacy and imaging services.

“The addition of a new community hospital in Mequon also supports our continued growth in the North Shore area and beyond and supports our focus of adding specialty care within the region and complements our expansion of primary care access across the health network,” Jacobson said.

Froedtert Health Center Urgent Care in Mequon closed indefinitely Feb. 1, citing staffing issues related to COVID-19. About 40 full-and part-time emergency physicians and registered nurses staff the community hospitals.

“We are extremely grateful to our providers and staff whose tireless work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has enabled us to open four new hospitals during these challenging times which has allowed us to provide access to safe, high-quality care close to home,” said Jacobson.

Kenneth Ginlack Sr. featured speaker
Posted by Steve Lettau on Apr 29, 2022

MT Sunrise Rotary club was blessed to have Kenneth Ginlack Sr. speak at our weekly meeting this morning. Ken is the Executive Director of Serenity Inns, a holistic residential program offering hope to men who choose recovery over addiction and alcoholism.

Spanish Rotary Camp for Young Adults
Posted by Steve Lettau on Apr 28, 2022

ROTARY CAMP SIERRA DE GUADARRAMA (Madrid)
From July 30th to August 14th, 2022

Sponsored by the Rotary Club of Majadahonda in collaboration with the Rotary Clubs of Madrid and Castilla and Leon (SPAIN)

Download Program Details (PDF)

For more information contact John Cabaniss at 414-491-4019

Rotarian Alumni Reunion - Photo Gallery
Posted by Steve Lettau on Apr 26, 2022
OWLT Sponsor a Goat
Posted by Steve Lettau on Apr 19, 2022

History:

In 2020, Mequon-Thiensville (M-T) Sunrise Rotary Club in partnership with Ozaukee Washington Land Trust (OWLT) was able to maintain large tracts of land in an environmental-friendly way and still engage the community. The 2020 COVID restrictions on the gathering of large-scale volunteer groups required finding innovative ways to keep up with ongoing maintenance and stewardship amidst the pandemic. Without ongoing stewardship, the quality of the natural spaces will deteriorate over time. Missing a year of invasive species control efforts can result in the re-invasion of an area and threaten previous years of investment in staff/volunteer time and organizational resources. As a result, in mid-June 2020, the team welcomed some new recruits, the 'Grazing Goats Crew'.

The goats, along with M-T Sunrise Rotary and OWLT stewardship volunteers, began working on this important invasive species management activity, to tackle buckthorn and other brushy invasive species. This activity is beneficial as a sustainable management practice. Avoiding the use of herbicides maintains soil and water health, as well as, is friendly to our pollinators. Additionally, not only does this type of project support farmers, it keeps the goats happy by giving them a food source, and it allows for community engagement, in that park visitors were able to view the 'Grazing Goat Crew' in residence.

Due to the project success, the M-T Sunrise Rotary Club in partnership with OWLT continues to welcome the goats back to Mequon Rotary Parks - Pukaite Woods to continue their multiple-year job of eliminating brushy invasive species, which severely degrade critical wildlife habitats by shading out native species, and therefore, limiting available food sources for local wildlife. When an invasive species like buckthorn outcompetes native species like oaks, hickories, and other berry/nut-producing shrubs, woodlands trend towards fostering a lower diversity of trees, shrubs and woodland wildflowers. Maintaining diversity is important in keeping natural areas resilient against diseases, pests, and changing climate, as well as to provide ample food sources for local wildlife.

Congratulations Sri Vasudevan
Posted by Steve Lettau on Apr 26, 2022

Editors Note: Sri Vasudevan was the very first president of our club.

Lions Club International Second Vice President, Brian Sheehan presented our very own club member, Lion Sri Vasudevan with the Melvin Jones Fellow Award plaque, a Melvin Jones pin and Melvin Jones Progressive Pin for his involvement with the Childhood Cancer Initiative from 2017-21 at the MD27 State Convention in Green Bay.

Online Version
Posted by Steve Lettau on Apr 05, 2022
therotarianmagazine.com

Upcoming Speakers
Taylor Ruffing - Alzheimer's Association
Jun 03, 2022
Walk to End Alzheimer's
View entire list...
Upcoming Events
  • Club Meeting
    Mequon Public Market
    May 27, 2022
    7:00 AM – 8:00 AM
  • Club Meeting
    Mequon Public Market
    Jun 03, 2022
    7:00 AM – 8:00 AM
  • Club Meeting
    Mequon Public Market
    Jun 10, 2022
    7:00 AM – 8:00 AM
  • Changing of the Guard
    American Legion
    Jun 16, 2022
    6:00 PM – 8:15 PM
View More...
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MT Sunrise Rotary
PO Box 251
Thiensville, WI 53092

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