MINUTES OF: SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

 

PRESIDING:  John Barstow

 

BIRTHDAYS: Mike Kellogg, he elected to have our group sing to him

 

GUESTS:

Larry Jones

Ulrich Holzinger, who is actually a Club member

Amy Carlin, who is to be inducted as a new member 

Erin Ruble - our meeting speaker

Our RYLA students - Elsa Burrows and Jacques Snell

Our Exchange student - Sem Weenk, from the Netherlands

 

Our exchange student, Sem, told us how much he is enjoying his time here and appreciates the

Club sponsoring him. He also said how much he appreciates his host family.

 

He was asked what surprised him about living here in the US and he said the amount of soccer practice times; here they practice 6 days a week and at home it’s only 2 days. The time spent in school is different too; here is 8 to 3:20 and at home it is 10:30 to 4:20 some days and changes to 10:30 to noon other days.

He also mentioned he was surprised by the large portions of food restaurants serve.

Asked about plans after High School he said he plans to go back home and become a pilot.

 

The two RYLA students were introduced by Jason and presented a slide show. They thanked Jason for encouraging them to participate.

 

They both spoke about some of the valuable things they learned and some of the activities/projects they did while there. Jacques spoke about packaging 10,000 meals to send to South Africa, working with a group named “Rise Against Hunger”.

 

Elsa spoke about how valuable she felt it was to learn about leadership and all the connections they made during the three days they were there.

 

Jason gave them both awards for participation. 

 

 

“T” officially inducted our newest member, Amy Carlin, into our Club  Amy is the Special Assistant to the President of Middleburg College,   Welcome Amy!

 

Fines and Happy Dollars:

 

Fines: Ben fined himself for being late

           Lyn for her phone ringing through the presentation

           Jason L. was fined for having his company, Otter Creek Engineering, being nominated by the Chamber of Commerce for being the “Business of the Year”.    Congratulations!!

           

Happy Dollars:

            Rebecca, thanking John Barstow for pretending to be a stranger and taking a picture with her for one of the tasks she was giving at her Bachelorette party.

            Buzz, a happy $5.00 for taking an 8 day trip with his van where he covered 2,000 miles.

            Mike, Happy for the over $1,200 “goods” for the auction Lyn has brought in.

            Sylvie, thanking Spence and Judy for helping out with the minutes 

            Liz M. Happy $5.00 for having our great exchange student join us today and for Bill who is going to be taking him to a Bills game.

            John Barstow, for feeling bad he left the new member package at home and to thank those who helped put up the tent for the very successful ACCT event held this past week.

            Max, Glad to be here.

            

Spence introduced our guest speaker, his daughter-in-law, Erin Ruble.

Erin graduated from the University of Austin, TX and now works remotely as lawyer in TX.  She

volunteers in many activities in this area. She will talk to us about Restorative Justice today.

 

Erin spoke about how rewarding and meaningful her work with Restorative Justice is. Their goal is not to simply “lock them up” but try and repair the harm that has been done and give offenders tools to help prevent them from reoffending.  She said that some admit up front that they know what they did was wrong but with others it takes time for them to realize this. They ask the offender to come up with a contract on what they could have done differently. Some do community service, restitution payments and help build their life skills. They are given a support system and then they have a follow-up meeting to see how they have done. Some also need anger management classes to help them develop tools to control their anger. 

She said she has seen some huge positive changes in people she has worked with.

A large percentage of these offenders come from broken home and have experienced childhood trauma .

Asked if they need volunteers and how we can help, she said we could do two things.

1. Attend the training they have once a month

2. If we work with any organizations that volunteer their employees to help organizations, ask them to consider including Restorative Justice.

Thank you Erin!!

 

No winner for the cow tag.

 

Minutes submitted by Judy Brown