Each year on July 1, a new member of the New Paltz Rotary Club takes the helm as president, and a new president-elect is chosen to shadow him or her for the year before stepping in for the next term. That way all the volunteers stay fresh, and no one person has to pull more than their share of the weight. Geraldine Kelly has been announced as the newest Rotary president, and Melinda Lamarche has been named president-elect for 2025.
“We have an amazing club, in my opinion, because the people in it really want to be of service to the community,” says Kelly, who has been involved with the New Paltz Rotary Club for four years now. She came aboard just before the onset of Covid-19, and has done “a little bit on a lot of committees” while watching the local chapter of the international service organization increase significantly in membership and extend its assistance to more than twice as many people in need. She spent her “apprenticeship” year, just ended, collaborating with outgoing president Cathy Sifre.
While the club had to scale back some of its more social events during the pandemic and conduct others virtually — such as its single biggest annual fundraiser, the Win a Bundle 50/50 raffle — things have recently gotten more or less back to normal. The Touch-a-Truck event for kids returned from hiatus in 2023, and was held again at the Ulster County Fairgrounds on June 2. Zoom gatherings started out as a social-distancing tactic, but proved popular enough, Kelly notes, that the local group now meets twice a month remotely. On the other two weeks, Rotarians are now able to convene once more at Garvan’s Gastropub.
Kelly speaks enthusiastically about many of the Rotary’s ongoing activities, noting, “The scholarship program is my favorite thing.” Each year, the group donates $15,000 in scholarship support to “young adults who are doing good in the world” from a pool of candidates graduating New Paltz High School and BOCES. Rotary took over the program from the Chamber of Commerce Foundation at New Paltz upon the Chamber’s demise.
This spring marks a milestone in another of the group’s efforts in support of youth: the sixth year of the President’s Challenge at SUNY Ulster, in which the New Paltz Rotary Club sponsors one new eighth-grader each year who will become “the first in the family to get a college education.” The group supplies financial support and mentoring throughout high school and a two-year degree program at the community college. “We had our first graduation this year,” Kelly says proudly.
At the committee level she has been actively involved in another youth program that cultivates the same impulse to do community service that motivates adults to become Rotarians: the Interact club at New Paltz High School. “This past year they raised almost $1,000 for Sparrow’s Nest,” a local charity that delivers homemade meals to families facing a cancer diagnosis, Kelly reports. “We want to be really active with them.”
One project that grew exponentially during the pandemic, and has continued to be a major focus under Cathy Sifre’s presidency, was the Rotary’s Backpack Program. Social workers in the New Paltz Central School District identify students who are nutritionally at risk on weekends and during school breaks, when no subsidized lunch program is available to them. Each week, Rotarians load backpacks with food purchased from the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley and drop them off at the schools on Friday for confidential distribution. “Before COVID, the program served about 30 to 35 students. Then it shot up to about 90, because there were so many families in need. Afterwards it settled at about 70,” Kelly notes. “We’re just now starting up the summer program, serving 64 students.”
Each incoming New Paltz Rotary president is expected to choose a “theme” or pet project to emphasize, in which real progress can be demonstrated within a one-year term of office. Kelly, who was born in Dublin, Ireland and lived in Africa for much of her childhood before settling in the US for high school, is a psychotherapist by training and trade. She is now nearing retirement but still maintains a private practice. Activities emphasizing mental health for youth will be her area of focus during her presidency.
She has already reached out to Jim Tinger at the New Paltz Youth Center, Phoenix Kawamoto at the New Paltz Office for Community Wellness and Elise Gold at the Maya Gold Foundation to explore ways in which these organizations can work together. She has asked Gold to give a presentation to the Rotary Club about the foundation’s teen-to-teen Mental Health First Aid peer intervention project. Kelly thinks there might be a role for the Rotary Club to play in setting up a training program in MHFA techniques for adults in the community as well. Dana Katz, director of Family of Woodstock’s Community Justice initiative, is also on tap to speak to the group on the subject of restorative justice.
To learn more about New Paltz Rotary Club programs, how to donate, become a member or purchase Win a Bundle raffle tickets, visit www.newpaltzrotary.com. Updates on activities are posted regularly at www.facebook.com/NPRotarian. The group is actively looking for a new site for its annual Fishing Derby for 2024. Ideas and inquiries can be sent to newpaltzrotaryclub@gmail.com.
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