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Welcome to Needham! We are a great group of 30 members strong and growing. Men and Women, young and old – we meet for lunch every Tuesday. Our projects focus on giving back to both our community here and beyond.

JOIN US FOR LUNCH!
Tuesdays, 12:00-1:30pm
Needham Sheraton: 100 Cabot Street

With interesting speakers and an energized group
every week, you will come away inspired.

District Governor Diana Nestorova

Businesses

Join the Needham 100 Day Challenge Facebook group. http://www.facebook.com/groups/needham100daychallenge
Create a short video about your shop or restaurant and send it to Needham100Challenge@gmail.com

Community Supporters

Join the Needham 100 Day Challenge Facebook group. http://www.facebook.com/groups/needham100daychallenge
Use #Needham100Challenge on Instagram
The chamber is looking for social media influencers and volunteers to help with more aspects of the campaign to come.

ShelterBox

Posted on Sep 01, 2020

Rotary Club of Needham Newsletter September 1st, 2020

Speaker: Bill Tobin (photo below), Rotary Relations Manager, ShelterBox

ShelterBox is an international disaster relief agency that provides emergency shelter and building tools to families displaced by disaster or conflict. ShelterBox was founded 20 years ago by the Rotary Club of Helston-Lizard in England. It became Rotary's project partner in disaster relief in 2012, a role that it retains today. The Rotary Club of Needham has supported ShelterBox for the past twelve years. In addition to financial support, about 1000 Rotary members are involved in Shelter Box as volunteers, staff or response team members. Local Rotary clubs provide valuable, practical advice at the disaster sites: 90% of ShelterBox responses have been assisted by Rotary. Of the organization's $8.6mm of income in 2019, 13% was contributed from Rotary Clubs with the balance from: individuals (59%), foundations (24%), and corporations (2%).

In 2019, ShelterBox provided shelter to 145,000 families displaced by 11 disasters or conflicts in 9 countries, including: a cyclone in Malawi, flooding in Paraguay and Bangladesh, an earthquake and a typhoon in the Philippines and drought in Somaliland. ShelterBox helped those displaced by conflict in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Nigeria and Syria. Spending of $8.5mm in 2019 went to: program grants (81%) with the balance spent on administration and fundraising. That efficiency earned ShelterBox a four star (top) rating from Charity Navigator.

ShelterBox rose to prominence with its first large-scale disaster response: the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which displaced 20,000 families. Its largest response to date was the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which displaced 30,000 families. The civil war in Syria has elicited their longest deployment, helping 60,000 displaced families since 2012 to present. The largest US deployment was Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017, which displaced about 10,000 families. The overall size of the need for emergency shelter: 104mm people were displaced by disasters or conflict in 2019. Adding to their vulnerability, about 75% of displaced persons are women and children.

Each green shelter box is designed to hold emergency shelter and essential, basic household supplies that create the framework for everyday life. Each box contains a family sized tent that protects people from the elements and provides a safe space for people to start to recover from physical and emotional trauma. The boxes also hold a cooking set, a water carrier and filtration equipment, blankets, a solar light and school supplies. Shelter Kits contain hand tools (hammer, pliers, saw, hoe and shovel) to rebuild. Each box costs about $1000 per family.

Alex Goodale of Needham High School also addressed us to discuss her efforts to raise funds for ShelterBox. She leads the high school's ShelterBox Club, which organized a scavenger hunt, the "Stock the Box Challenge". For a $20 contribution participants received 15-20 clues and a chance at a bag of prizes. Their club raised $1700 for ShelterBox!

To donate or to volunteer, go to ShelterBox's website: http://www.shelterboxusa.org. You'll be helping in a good cause: ShelterBox was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in both 2018 and 2019.

The Challenge of Remote Learning

Posted on Aug 18, 2020

Rotary Club of Needham Newsletter August 18th, 2020

In Our Community:

Watch for an email list of our club's typical, annual community projects, so we can discuss re-imagining and re-purposing them in the context of a pandemic and recession at out August 25th meeting.

Speaker: Stacy Gauthier (photo below), Consultant for Pedagogy and Technology, spoke of "Understanding the Modern Classroom: Challenges and Solutions for Remote Learning"

Stacy has been a science educator since 1997, and she is currently the Middle Grades (5th - 8th) Science Department Head for the Town of Natick as well as a private consultant. She is married to Charles Nelson. She discussed the challenge of teaching in remote learning environments imposed in response to the coronavirus. She used "pedagogy", the method and practice of teaching, to organize her presentation. She contrasted traditional with best current teaching practices. Traditionally, a teacher lectured to a class while standing at the front of the room. Under current best practice, several teachers facilitate small group discussions among students using laptops within the classroom. But that is not socially distant, and Zoom doesn't facilitate collaboration. So, the lack of interaction made it harder for today's teachers and students to adapt to remote learning.

Stacy demonstrated a teaching technology called "Pear Deck" that allows students in a remote learning environment to interact with their teacher's slide presentation at their own pace. We learned about a worsening achievement gap between affluent and poor school districts due to the cost and shortages of remote learning technology. We discussed different approaches to the problem of kids that have not been logging on to keep up with their remote educations. Schools in Massachusetts will return to mandatory attendance in the Fall. A punative approach to "truancy" by threatening parents with a charge of "neglect" is unlikely to improve remote attendance or learning outcomes, given the problems imposed by pandemic and recession. Those problems include a lack of childcare for essential workers and a shortage of laptops when parents and children are all working from home. Instead, when a student repeatedly fails to log on in Natick, it triggers out-reach to the family by school-based social workers. Finally, Stacy reminded us to be sensitive to teachers' legitimate fear of becoming sick in a return to an in-person learning environment before the rollout of a vaccine.

Next Week's Meeting (8/25/20): Discuss re-imagining our Club's projects during the pandemic