Beaver Dam Rotary Club's program for January 28th was Judith Bernd executive director of BID "Business Improvement District" of the city of Hartford. She discussed the purpose and goals of BID. The purpose of BID is to promote the orderly development of the City of Hartford by providing an organization and funding vehicle to develop and promote the downtown area for the economic benefit of all businesses and property owners within the District. She stated that it takes a lot of work and a lot of time to establish a BID in a community but it is well worth the effort. She stresses that to have a good BID, it is important to have a good working relationship with the city officials. One of the goals of BID is to design, develop and implement marketing programs and strategies that promote an image of the downtown area as prosperous and unified and which specifically work towards minimizing the downtown business vacancy rate, as well as promoting a proper retail mix. To get more information or to join Rotary please call 920-887-4165 and ask for John Zanghi. You may also come to our meeting now held at Old Hickory Gold Course every Monday at Noon.
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Adam Huebner gave a program at Rotary's January 28th meeting. He works for the Rock River Public Health Emergency Preparedness Consortium serving Watertown, Jefferson and Dodge County areas discussed what his program does at the county level.  They work closely with area hospitals and clinics on disease surveillance following up on reports of diseases to the health department.  Another responsibility of the consortium is to coordinate mass dispensing of medication to the public in situations such as communicable diseases.  There are several designated sites around Dodge County for this purpose. They also run emergency exercises in collaboration with police, fire and hospital where they set up an emergency situation and run through the steps to make a successful outcome.

Adam also discussed the importance of family and individual preparedness.  There are three steps that he focused on. The first one is to have a plan by sitting down with family and neighbors to discuss the potential hazards that could happen.  Then looking at what is needed to do to handle those hazards.  Adam suggested having a list of phone numbers of family members or neighbors for the children.  The second thing is to make a kit.  This kit should include 3-4 days of food and water.  It is a good idea to have some cash on hand as well.  The banks or ATM’s may not be operating in a disaster.  Have some extra prescriptions if you can, batteries, and flashlight.  The third step is to stay aware of what is going on.  Listen to the radio and know what is happening.  If you would like to know more about health emergency preparedness, you may contact Adam at 920-285-0133 or e-mail him at ahuebner@ct.watertown.wi.us

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At Beaver Dam Rotary's January 28th meeting, Bob Biel of K&B Tree and Lawn Service received a Paul Harris Award  through a donation from our club in his name in appreciation for all he did for our Centennial Project a couple of years ago, including the initial planting of trees in Rotary Park.  Pictured from left are a representative of Rotary Dan Larson, Rotary President John Zanghi,  Bob Biel, and Phil Fritche, His representative from Beaver Dam Rotary Club.

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Pastor Mark Molldrem (left) and John Jahnke (right) from First Lutheran Church accept a check for $1000 from Beaver Dam Rotary president John Zanghi (center).  These funds will help with the shipping costs of school materials Pastor Molldrem is collecting for the school children in Monrovia, Liberia.  To donate items please call Pastor Molldrem at 885-4497.

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Diane Becker, Chairman of the Dementia Concerns Coalition of Dodge County gave a presentation at Rotary's March 4th meeting explaining the function of the organization.  The Dementia Concerns Coalition is an organization of concerned community members dedicated to the improvement of the quality of life for individuals affected by dementia and their loved ones by coordinating community resources, offering advocacy, information, support and education.  Diane defined dementia and that it must be significant enough to interfere with one’s daily life.  She stated that Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia but other diseases can also cause dementia.  Since 1998 the DCC has provided assistance to individuals with dementia and their families through various fundraising events.   The DCC recently sponsored a Family Care Giver Conference to educate caregivers on legal issues and tips for caring for someone with dementia.  For more information please contact Diane at 887-4282 or see the March 3rd newsletter.

Rich Brouillard, principle of the Beaver Dam Middle School and Steve Vessy (right), Human Resources/Vice Principle of the Beaver Dam Middle School spoke at the March 31st meeting to members about how the demographics of the middle school student are changing.  Rich and Steve stressed that their students are achieving better than they ever have before.  They actually go to the student’s home and take them to school (with parent’s permission). Rich and Steve also spoke about building relationships with the students and their parents in order to help the student achieve in school. Meetings are held twice a month to talk about what is going on in the school and talk about how they can correct it. They have also started a program of Saturday school.  This program has helped many of the students get back on track. Rich and Steve have seen much improvement in the overall grades and attendance of their students because of  intervention strategies.

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Marty Stanton (right) was the sponsor for Michael Firchow owner of Absolute Financial and Celestial Scents. He spoke with members of Beaver Dam Rotary at the April 4th meeting about the upcoming Leadership factor seminar simulcast to be held at First Lutheran Church on Friday April 18, 2008. Michael sits on the Leadership Factor Committee that works to bring in the Maximum Impact Seminars and supports leadership in the community.
Michael shared with members his definition of a good leader and what it takes to be a good leader.  He stressed how important it is to lead by example and to take the high road when confronted with adversity.  He stated that a good leader must have a vision and communicate that vision to others.   Michael commented on the wonderful infrastructure Beaver Dam has.  He stated that the government, schools, and hospital are working hard to make Beaver Dam a great place to live.  He remarked that Beaver Dam has a low tax base and low crime rate which is a testimony to the effective infrastructure of Beaver Dam.

The Group Study Exchange – GSE team – from Buenos Aries, Argentina gave a presentation highlighting their country and discussed with Beaver Dam Rotary members as well as Columbus and Horicon members their individual professions and their reasons for coming to the United States. All of the members of this team work with people with disabilities. The five member team was lead by a Rotary member from Argentina who also works with people with disabilities. They shared with members their love and aspirations for those they care for.  The team arrived in Wisconsin on April 13^th and will be touring different cities and sharing their program with many different groups until their departure on May 10^th. 

            This GSE team has a real passion for what they are trying to accomplish in their country and learn from agencies in the United States in the field of disabilities.  Each member is specialized in a different facet of disabilities.  They bring a well rounded, complete representation of professionals in this field.

            After their presentation, the team took a tour of Green Valley Enterprises.  They asked many wonderful questions of the different department heads and learned quite a bit about their agency.  GVE staff learned much from them as well.  It was a great exchange of information.  GSE is an international Rotary program that consists of one Rotarian as team leader and a small group of non Rotarian professionals who visit other countries to exchange ideas and learn from those countries.

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May 13, 2008

Rotary member Marty Stanton gave a presentation about the High Expectation Program and the Teen Center.  High Expectations vision is to empower youth to support communities and communities to support youth.  What they want to do is to empower the youth to be active members in the community but also strengthening the community support system for health youth development.  Marty explained what it takes to make a youth feel successful and what is needed in the community and at home to help them achieve their goals.  High Expectations supports other organizations in the Dodge Co. area. They work with the school, non-profits and other businesses in the area to see what they can do to grow what is already going on in the community. In order to serve the teen population, the board members need to know what the teens need and how they are thinking.  In order to accomplish this 50% of the board has to be less than 30 years of age.  The co-vice president has to be less than 21 years of age.  This allows them to always have a youth voice sitting on their board.  The hours are 3:30 to 5:30pm during the school year, with extended hours on Friday and Saturdays.  The hours are 1:30 to 7:30 during the summer.  Marty is considering extending these hours if funds are available. This program is doing it’s best to bridge the gap between the youth and the adults in our community.

Shirley Kitchen from Dodge County Human Services gave a presentation at Rotary's June 2nd meeting about the Wisconsin W2
program. Human Services provides various programs to about 8700 residents. The W2 program serves
anywhere from 33 to 50 families at a time. It is based on the applicant’s income and assets. The applicants
must have children and have a job to be eligible. A thorough assessment of each applicant is done then placed
in a ladder based system. There are 3 steps of the ladder, each covering a different need.
Participants may only be on this program for a total of 5 years over their lifetime. This a very time
consuming program to administer. Statistics on its effectiveness are not really available, but they do know that 44% stay employed for at least ¾ of a year. If you have any questions call Dodge County Human Services at
386-3760.

Amanda Sherry of the Boy Scouts of America shared with the Beaver Dam Rotary Members her duties as a District Executive for the Bay Lakes Council. Amanda praised Beaver Dam’s involvement with the boy scouts and the work the adult volunteers do to help the scouts. There are 153 youth involved in Boy Scouts in Beaver Dam. Troops in Beaver Dam raised $37,000 dollars in popcorn sales last year. If anyone is interested in joining Boy Scouts or would like to be an adult volunteer, please call Amanda at 920-319-1278. Beaver Dam Rotary supports The Boy Scouts and has supported them with funds in the past.
SEE: http://www.baylakesbsa.org/
council/contact.htm

Beaver Dam Rotary inducted Daune DeVries (center)as a new member on Monday June 9th. Daune is an escrow officer with Title Consultants in Beaver Dam. She is also an independent beauty consultant with Mary Kay Cosmetics. Daune is pictured with her sponsor Denise Fitzsimmons and Club representative John Moser.

At the Beaver Dam Rotary's June 23rd meeting Beaver Dam resident Howard Moon shared with the members his family’s personal struggles with Mental Illness as his nephew suffers from Bi Polar disorder.  Howard introduced our speaker and representative of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Eva Martinez to the Rotary members. NAMI, as it is better known, is the nation’s largest grassroots organization for people with mental illness and their families.  NAMI was founded in 1979 and has affiliates in every state and in more than 1,100 local communities across the country. NAMI’s mission is to eradicate mental illness and to improve the quality of life for persons of all ages who are affected by mental illnesses.  They do this by providing support, education and advocacy.  Howard was very pleased to announce that Dodge County has a NAMI organization.  The group meets every third Wednesday of them month at the Pyramid Restaurant at 5:15.  Anyone who knows the effects of mental illness or know family members who are dealing with mental illness are welcome to attend this free meeting. Eva Martinez is employed by NAMI as the consumer council coordinator. She shared her very personal journey with mental illness and the struggles she endured in the early years of her diagnosis.  Because of these struggles she is a huge advocate for the NAMI organization and the good works it does for those suffering from mental illness.  Eva shared some startling statistics involving people and family member with mental illnesses.

At Rotary's July 14th meeting Annette Kamps from the Beaver Dam Community Theater Project was at the meeting to talk about their goals for moving to the old YMCA building. The program started with four of the children from their current production of Seussical Jr singing the song "It’s Possible". see: http://www.bdact.org for tickets and information. Left to right are Meredith Turner, Anna Biel, Meghan Turner and Alex Derr, Annette shared with us how their current building is set up and some of its shortcomings like not being handicap accessible. She had the blueprints along to show us the plans for the YMCA building. This would give them more seating, parking and would be handicap
accessible. The thought is to hopefully help revitalize downtown and make a culture corner along with the
chamber office and museum. They are currently applying for grants and looking into fundraising to be able to purchase the $450,000 building.

The Beaver Dam Rotary club took a tour of the Dodge County Jail in Juneau, Wisconsin.  Deputy Administrator, Kevin Hill gave the tour and showed the club the types of inmates and cells they were provided.  This is a very modern, clean, secure facility and it is large enough to serve this area for a long time. Pictured (left to right). Front Row: Daune DeVries, Kevin Hill, Howard Moon, Denise Fitzsimmons, Diane Becker, Beverly Ovalle, Dennis Levenhagen, Lea Priewe. 
Second row: Kay Stellflug, John Moser, Chris Connaughty, Ron Lindgren, Gary Cox.
Third row: Stacy Neperud, Dave Heying.

At Beaver Dam Rotary Club's September 22 meeting Bev O’Valle (Beaver Dam's Postmaster) presented the guest speaker Karen Zander (pictured), who is the postmaster in Fall River. Karen had previously spent a year in Milwaukee in the marketing department. Karen talked about various things that a person is able to do at USPS.com, such as buy stamps, find post office locations and phone numbers, get customized postage, print shipping labels, hold your mail, and create cards that can be delivered to the recipient on a certain day. Bev O’Valle stated that there are different ways to advertise your business depending on what you do and the post office has information to help with that. she also mentioned that if you purchase your postage online, you save 10% off international and 5% off domestic.

District governor Tom Marshall, his wife and fellow Rotarian Joey Marshall, their exchange student from Sweden, Louise Arvestahl and Assistant governor Al Strohschein were at our meeting.  Governor Marshall talked about the new Rotary International theme of “Make Dreams Real”.  He stated that 26000 kids below the age of 5 die each day.  The majority of these are preventable deaths.  He wants each rotary club to come up with a project to reduce child mortality. Governor Tom touched on many other projects that he would like our club to get involved with such as EREY, Every Rotarian Every Year, which is where each individual member donates $100 a year.  He also mentioned Youth Exchange, Ambassadorial Scholarships, Friendship Exchange and Group Study Exchange, among others.  The main goal is still to eradicate polio and for this they want each club to give $1000 a year for 3 years.  The Bill Gates Foundation has donated $100 million to this project and Rotary has to match these funds over a 3 year period.  Polio is still an issue in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.  Betty Faas shared with the club how Polio had affected the lives of some of her friends and led to their deaths.  She proposed a challenge for our club; if we can come up with $1000 in a month, she will match it herself. Governor Tom also asked us to increase our membership and challenged each of us to ask one person to join Rotary. The last thing they mentioned was  the 2009 District 6250 Conference, which will take place May 1,2,3 2009 in Wisconsin Rapids. 

Ken Peters, who is the municipal court judge for both the city and town of Beaver Dam spoke at Rotary's September 29th meeting. He was elected to his position and started May 1, 2007. It is a two year position. They currently
hold court every other week and have trials once a month. There are motion hearings in between. Ken’s office sees approximately 2500 cases a year. Of these, many are juveniles. Many of the cases involve underage drinking and drug use. He also hears cases concerning truancy. He talked about some of the different
punishments he has given such as: truancy; $500 fine, taking away driving privileges, homebound detention, taking away work permits, taking away hunting and fishing licenses and sending their mom or dad with them to school for
a week. Ken mentioned that they are approaching $300,000 in fines this year and of that amount, the city gets 70%. 

The speaker at the October 6th meeting was Ogie Shaw from Beaverton Oregon, a professional fitness consultant, and
Executive Director of Community Fitness Leaders. He talked to us about fitting fitness into our schedules.
Ogie stated that exercise is the best medicine as far as its health results but that it is the most under prescribed.
He said that if exercise is fun than you are not doing it right. One needs to use the overload principle, which
means that there will be no improvement in your fitness until you get (the muscle) tired and then do more. He touched on an eating program called Nutripoints which involves foods having a point value, either positive or negative and one should eat to 100 points in a day. He also stated that you should measure your fitness level once a week with various tests. 1) Sit on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you, a woman should
be able to stretch her fingers 7” past her toes and a man 5” past. 2) Step up and down off a step for 3 minutes
and then measure your heart rate, it should be under 156 beats per minute for a woman and under 144 beats per
minutes for a man. 3) A woman should measure her wrist and her chest size should be 6 times that measurement, her waist 4 ½ times and her hips 6 times. A man’s chest should be at least 6 inches larger than
his waist and for every inch that your waist is bigger than your chest it knocks 2 years off your life expectancy. His website is www.ogieshawfitness.com

Our speaker for the October 13th meeting was Terry Letvinchuck (left), who talked about the Beaver Dam Community Hospital Foundation.  Dan Larson (Rotary President) is standing to her right. She thanked all of us for our donations to the Foundation as Rotary has donated to it in the past.  She touched on many things that the Foundation has provided for in the community.  The biggest thing would be the new hospital that they raised $2.5 million for.  Some of the other many things they have provided for are automatic external defibrillators in the police cars, arthritic exercise equipment at the senior center and a program at the hospital called Employees Helping Employees, which provides assistance to families in tragic/ crisis situations.  There were many, many other things that the Foundation provided and Terry stated that if you live in this community, your life has probably been touched by something the Foundation did, without you even realizing it. 

Kristin Hanson Brown from High Expectations came to Rotary's October 27th meeting to talk about the work she does through a community based abstinence education grant.  She goes out and talks to parents of teenagers where they stress prevention versus intervention. They like to get the kids to make healthy decisions.  Allow them to make high risk decisions but get rid of negative risks.  Potentially breaking your neck snowboarding would be a high risk situation versus speeding down a road after you’ve drank or used drugs, which would be a negative risk.  Kristen passed out a paper of 40 developmental assets that are looked for in adolescents.  It is believed that these assets are the building blocks for healthy development.  The more assets that an individual has the less likely they are to engage in negative risk situations.  More information about the assets can be found at
www.high-expectations.org .  She stated that in the end it’s about the youth and they do try really hard to live up to our expectations.

Jon Litscher from city hall who is the president of the COMMON Council gave a brief update on city affairs at Rotary's November 3rd meeting.  Jon is an alderperson from ward 11.  Some of the things that he talked about were the downtown renovation, road/street improvements, utility infrastructure and a large facility study.  Concerning the downtown renovation he noted that one needs to look at why they would be renovating downtown Beaver Dam.  Would it be for nostalgia or as an anchor for development of the entire city?  He said that cities need responsible/ smart growth, not just growth.  Jon mentioned that the city has just finished a large facility study where they have looked at new construction versus remodeling for such things as the police department, the senior citizen center and the library.  He stated that the city council is currently debating facilities and there should be a meeting coming up in the next few weeks that is open to the public.  One needs to give their input  to an alderperson before a decision has been made concerning what they think is right or wrong for the city.

Jamie Kratz Gullickson, who is the director of PAVE, joined Beaver Dam Rotary for their November 11th meeting.  PAVE (People Against a Violent Environment) is a non-profit agency providing shelter, services and education to those affected by domestic violence and sexual assault.  They currently have a 22 bed shelter but are hoping to increase to 24 beds.  They have 6 full-time employees and several part-time workers and volunteers.  This year they have handled over 1700 crisis calls and provided over 1900 nights of shelter, which is almost double of what they had the year prior.  It costs them roughly $50 per bed per day to run their shelter and if everyone in Dodge County donated $5, PAVE could operate for over one year on those donations.  Jamie shared with us a story of a family affected by domestic violence and sexual assault and how they were able to help them.  The family was a composite of many cases that they see as she is not able to divulge specifics due to privacy laws.  If you or someone else has a need to contact PAVE please call 800-775-3785 or 920-887-3810.   You may also go to their website at www.peopleagainstaviolentenvironment.com for more information.  Beaver Dam Rotary is a supporter of PAVE.  Dan Larson, President of Beaver Dam Rotary, is shown handing Jamie Kratz Gullickson (center) a check from the club.  Cindy Zirble Wrucke (left) was her Rotary sponsor. 

Kay Stellplug's husband, Dr Jack Stellpflug, came to our meeting December 1st to talk about preventing cavities/tooth decay. He stated that if you can get a child to the age of 18 with no cavities, then the chances of them getting one are slim. Dr Jack said that filling a cavity is treating the endpoint of a progressive disease. Cavities come from two things; 1) bacteria that form acid around themselves and 2) fertilizer that drives the process, i.e. Sugar. He said that it is not how much sugar you eat but how frequently. To suppress the bacteria that cause decay one needs to brush, floss, use mouthwash and starve the bacteria (don’t give them sugar). Dr Jack talked about xylitol, which is a naturally occurring sugar alcohol. It can be therapeutic at certain levels and works toward suppressing the bacteria that cause cavities. Xylitol is in some chewing gums, but the problem is the levels of it are not made public so there is no guarantee as to whether it is helping or not. Dan Larson (Rotary President) is to the left.