 Hi, my name is John Rogers. I'm a member of Early Bird Rotary. We meet on Thursday mornings at Al & Al. With me today are Judith Slaney of the Sheboygan Rotary Club and Jerry Plain, also a member of Early Bird Rotary. What we're here to do today is tell you more about a program called Making Spirits Bright, which is unique to Sheboygan and Sheboygan County, and also to help you understand what Rotary is about locally, nationally, and worldwide. So I'm going to ask Judith and Jerry a series of questions that will hopefully help you understand what we're all about and specifically what Making Spirits Bright is going to be all about. I'm going to start with Judith. Judith, help our viewers understand what Rotary International is all about and then when you continue your answer, what does that mean to a local Sheboygan, Sheboygan County perspective? Thank you for asking. Rotary International is the largest service organization in the world, has 1.3 million members and over 33,000 clubs around the world. As I said, it is a service organization and it focuses in five specific areas. One that many people may be aware of is Polio Plus, our health area. And Polio Plus has been a project we've been working on for many years in order to annihilate Polio from the world. There are four countries left where Polio still has a few cases throughout the year and that is Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria. The other avenues of service are water because we know that clean water and sanitation helps in health also, literacy, helping children in particular to be better readers, to know more about their world. Health as I said with Polio and the most recent addition is New Generations which is focused on young people, on students. So there are organizations such as Interact which is a small rotary club in a high school. Rotoract is a community or university rotary club and then we have our community clubs which are clubs as you said you belong to the early birds and I belong to the Sheboygan Rotary Club. We also have two other clubs in the community which are one is located in Plymouth and then there is Rotary West and they meet on Tuesdays, Plymouth meets on Wednesdays, and my club meets on Mondays. Okay, you talked about the five global missions. How does that translate into what happens here? In other words, what do the local clubs contribute to the community? Okay, I can talk a little of our club. I'm sure that Jerry can tell a little about what your club does and maybe a little about the other ones but we provide, we do fundraisers that provide funds to help specific organizations. A couple years ago we helped buy a new stove for Salvation Army. This year we gave a contribution to Salvation Army for their campaign, their capital campaign. Just we decided to give money to Meals on Wheels. They're building a new building and our club also has service that we provide to the community. Every Wednesday we have four Rotarians from the Sheboygan Rotary Club that deliver Meals on Wheels in pairs. We do two routes every Wednesday. We're also helping with the taste of Sheboygan. We're volunteering for that and we're open to help volunteer. We just did something for the EAA out at the Sheboygan Airport. So it's manpower. We help raise money for specific projects here in Sheboygan and internationally. Okay Jerry, talk about some of the things that Early Bird Rotary does. I'd be happy to. The motto of Rotary is service above self. So as Judy has already indicated we are always looking for service projects to get our members involved to give back to the community if you will. The most recent project that we had was adopting the Rotary Intersection on 8th and Indiana in Sheboygan. We cleaned up that area very nicely, put in a lot of lovely plants and mulch and continued to maintain it. Watering it through this very drought. Summer that we've had takes a lot of volunteers but we have a schedule on a weekly basis and so somebody goes there two or three times a week in order to do that. We've been very involved in Habitat for Humanity over the years so as those projects come up on an annual basis we always provide volunteers for that as well. We do have a foundation so we do receive requests on a somewhat regular basis and as our funds allow, as Judy said in her club, we too provide dollars toward other non-profits who are in need. Okay, okay. Right and I think one of the things that interested me early on about Rotary was the amount of money that is contributed every year to new generations in terms of scholarship. I think we contributed to two students this year. I believe your club contributed also. Yes, we have a scholarship every year for a high school student that's going to the university and as Jerry was saying we also have contribute dollars and volunteers to rebuilding together every spring and April. Okay. It's always exciting when we have our club meetings to learn about some of the different things, some of the different ways that our members are contributing to the community. That's a good overview I think of what Rotary is all about. Help me understand a little bit about the Making Spirits Bright program because this is a unique program where all four of the clubs in Sheboygan County are contributing brain power, manpower, all kinds of different things. So where did the idea start with Making Spirits Bright? I think where it started, Judy and I happened to attend the same Rotary conference and one of our sister clubs was there doing a breakout session telling all of the attendees about their show which was very much like this in Washington County. Okay. They provided a DVD that really got us excited because we got to see their lights in action on this DVD but I think more importantly was the reason they were doing it which we are certainly happy to talk about and that would be the admission to these light shows would be items for the area food pantries. Okay. So is the light show an open air type of thing or does it occur within a building? Help me understand the magnitude of what a Making Spirits Bright program could entail. It is an outdoor program basically. We are going to be holding it at Evergreen Park between November 15th and December 16th. Okay. It will be open approximately four hours on about 24 evenings during that time period. Okay. It is a drive-through. Obviously it needs to be dark so between five and nine p.m. Okay. So is this going to be like a neighborhood light show, a neighborhood static display show? My mind is trying to capture what this might look like. I don't think we want to give away the whole show but it is certainly going to be something that we hope leaves a huge impact to the people who attend because the object is to make this an annual event. Okay. So there will be movement in some of these lights displays in that it isn't just a solid display that people come in and it's not, there's no movement to it. Okay. We are purchasing what we call controllers that can cause these lights to blink or to flash. Just one example, we are going to have bells across the bridge in the center of the park. Okay. So they will be on at intervals, there are 15 of these bells and so there will be that effect versus just 15 bells all shining at one specific time. All right. But as I said, we don't want to give away everything that's going to be in there but we are in the process now of making all these displays or finishing them and we start with a steel grid on which rope lighting is strung to outline whatever the display is to be depicting. Is this going to be viewed within a car, on foot, by skis, anyway, anywhere? It is primarily a drive-through. Okay. That is the goal. The city is cooperating very nicely with us, assures us that if we have snow that it will be plowed. Good. So people can enter off of Highway 42 and go with a full drive gamut through the park. Okay. Is there anything similar to this that you know of in Sheboygan County that another service club might have put together at one time or another? And you mentioned Washington County. Is that presumably the closest light show like this? If in fact it is a light show? Okay. There is a smaller version at the Sharon Richardson Hospice Center that has, I'm sorry to say I've never seen it but I understand that it's also very nice but not to the extent or the expanse that it is. In addition, there's also an indoor event and that will be taking place across the street from Evergreen Park at the JC Quarry building. It will be an opportunity for families to come. They will park there. They then they will get out of the car, come inside. Santa will be there. They can take family pictures. They can have snacks, hot chocolate cookies, things like that. Okay. So they can spend some time there. We're hoping to get organizations, small coral groups for high school coral groups, maybe some church coral groups to sing during part of it while you're there. Okay. So it's an opportunity for two aspects to do the drive-through and to come and see Santa and hear some Christmas music. All right. That sounds good. So obviously the four Rotary Clubs are involved. Who else has been involved? And when you talk about Rotary Clubs, has there been a lot of talk? Has there been a lot of actual building things? What's been happening? Well we did begin building earlier this summer and we do have the bells that I spoke of are all completed. Okay. We have some other little Christmas trees and again I won't share what they are made of but those are completed. We're now working on a plethora of stars that are going to be hung over a canopy of trees that are in the park. This park is such a wonderful venue for this. It's just unnatural and the opportunities are endless. We know that we cannot fill the park this first year but our attempt is to be having a focus in a certain part of it that people are going to go home and say wow I have to tell my neighbor about this or I have to tell all of my relatives about this so that they go and of course to encourage them to come back again next year. Okay. For people to experience the whole making spirits bright, how much time should they allocate? 20 minutes? 40 minutes? Hour and a half? Oh that's a good question. That's a very good question. I would say probably 20 minutes is a good good estimation. Okay. Because I said we aren't going to light up the entire route this year. Okay. So they will reach a point where there is no longer something to see perhaps and then that that would speed up their exit but we certainly want them to be able to take enough time you know that they can stop and watch motion at a certain spot if there is motion in that particular display. However the flip side of that of course is we can't allow them to get out of their vehicles and take pictures because that could slow up people who are behind them which isn't a good thing. If I could quote some statistics from our sister clubs both in Washington County and also La Crosse and Marshfield who also have light shows like this they have experienced over the years anywhere from 200 to as many as 900 cars in one evening. So as you can see you would want to keep that flow moving as much as possible but still not hurrying people so that they feel that you know they didn't have enough time to take it all in. I was in La Crosse a number of years ago and I believe I saw sort of the fringe of the light show and had to ask a few questions as to what it was but I was very impressed with it and I know in some of the things that you have talked about at our Rotary Club meetings in some of the pictures that you've shown it's clearly something that I think people will want to know more about and participate in and actually I have kind of a distant relative who works for an electrical outfit in La Crosse and he just gushes about the success in La Crosse and what that has done to the community so okay we the lights are up somebody comes to tour it what do they bring do they bring canned food do they bring money do they bring all of the above we'll probably be making some announcements in the newspaper and things specifically we'll be asking the food bank here in Sheboygan as just specific needs that are in our community because each community is unique sometimes we forget paper products are also something that people need and additional to women's products personal care products that we will be asking the food pantries and the food bank in particular is where we will be delivering the food to and then they will distribute to the food banks as they indicate their need but they will be indicating to us what specific is needed here in Sheboygan County because it is unique okay okay that's very good and that that helps me understand a little bit better who is going to benefit from all of the the items that get gathered what is the immediate need of making spirits bright as gerry indicated a couple times in her comments that we can't light up the whole park this year okay and we initially had hoped to to have that as our plan but we didn't raise sufficient funds so what we're looking for is we have a little a little just a little bit that we need yet we're so close to our fundraising goal okay you may have seen things in the newspaper that we were asking for people in the community our goal is another twenty five thousand dollars in order to be able to fill the park with lights as far as our design is this year okay okay and is there a deadline for raising that twenty five thousand dollars yes there absolutely is and it's quite soon okay we need to make that decision by the end of this month and that's perhaps for a couple of reasons we've somewhat put construction on hold because if for some reason we did not raise this money we would not be spending that money perhaps right away either until we are sure that our sponsors are okay with that those that have come forward to this point if we wait any longer for dollars to come in we are jeopardizing our ability to get all of the displays completed because we do intend as early as mid-october to begin setting things up in the park okay and that point in time we are going to be looking for lots and lots of volunteers in the community to help us with that because it is going to take a lot more manpower than what is currently on our steering but for right now it's it's raising that twenty five thousand dollars so that the displays can be built and other things can be accomplished yes right so this isn't the classic put off your christmas shopping until december 24th no you've got to have your making spirits bright shopping done this week that's correct okay okay um how does a person make their contribution do you have any format right now is there a website are there contact people help me understand you know i'm sitting in my living room right now and i want to write out a check or something who do i send that check to where do i get more information we have established an account um at associated bank okay our early bird rotary foundation is providing this account so that all donations are tax deductible and so if someone would like to send a donation it would be mailed to sheboygan early bird foundation okay in care of associated bank and rogers okay at 12 17 north taylor drive sheboygan wisconsin five three zero eight one okay additionally if they need more information we do also have a website okay which is rotary making spirits bright dot org okay just to reiterate that's rotary making spirits bright dot org where you can get more information and i believe you brought a video which explains and shows people what making spirits bright might look like and i think that is going to follow this discussion that we're having um is there anything else that somebody you know in the discussions that you had with the person from washington county how long have they been doing this uh has it been a snowball effect where other people within the community have gotten so intrigued and so captivated by the the program that it has just grown and grown and grown you mentioned washington county right will be their fourth year okay and although the rotary clubs the four clubs in washington county got together and created the event a lot of individuals in the community are now becoming part of it but i think the premier one that we are looking at and that we really use for our focus and our expertise is lacrosse okay because they have been in existence now they completed their 17th year and they have gone from a few hundred thousand pieces of food which seems like a huge amount but they are now at about 1.3 million pieces of food that they've been able and when you say pieces of food this is a can of cans of food they actually weigh it they don't count every piece but they weigh it in order to determine about how many and it's just grown over the 17 years to be an amazing event and they have a lot more people in the community involved as volunteers than what the Rotarians are at this point translate if you can that 1.3 million pieces of food into the number of individuals or families that maybe have been helped in lacrosse i think lacrosse is a little bit smaller than sheboygan in terms of overall population about the same size about the same size okay they have a little bit of a different configuration with the university there but do you have any idea either of you know how many people have been impacted by the 1.3 million no i'm sorry we don't know okay okay but that that's got to be a huge benefit and with the way things have been here in sheboygan county for the last few years i know a number of the food pantries including one in the church that i go to it's it's it's an every week or every month whenever the food pantry is open the the resources are exhausted just because there is such tremendous need for food disposable items and some of the other things that you mentioned so clearly this should be a good program and who knows how the economy is going to play out for the balance of the year or the future so all we can say is that there clearly is a need and this is a way to help fill that need with either monetary contributions or contributions of cans of food or whatever and and also volunteers as we move forward because we're confident that we're going to hit this goal and we're going to move forward we will be looking for additional volunteers to help us build the displays as jerry said to help put the displays up in the park also to volunteer there can be let's say a youth group from a church that can come and welcome people into the park that evening collect the food products load them up into the truck that's taken away later along the route there's all different ways they can help they can help uh you know help people get to see santa claus and things so there's lots of different ways that they'll be able to help us throughout the time i can think of two avenues to go down there is something called the volunteer center yes network here in shabuagan county and i know they're always looking for ways to get other organizations involved through volunteer my wife and her co-worker have been uh leading the youth group at our church for the last 28 years and they're always looking for ways to get their their youth involved uh in different programs and the sunday school teach class that i teach is always looking for opportunities as well so i think one of the thing we do want to mention and you'll hear a little bit on the video but we sure do want to put a plug in for our our premier sponsor the festival foods they have been great to work with and have been very generous to help us and clearly we wouldn't have been able to press forward without them okay what have they contributed they're our premier sponsor at the $10,000 level okay um they will also help us out in our concession area with discounted items mark skogan has actually made a statement on the dvd that would be shown after this program indicating why he feels this is an important project okay in the in the few seconds that we have remaining is there anything else that you would like to say i just would like to appeal to the public because of the great need of our food pantries that's the reason why we feel this event is so important and it's affordable to anybody to come we're not charging a five dollar fee to get in or a ten dollar fee to get in it is really for the benefit to help all of those people in need in our community and that need has grown so much in the last five or six years okay so the dollars will be well spent to get people into the park to see the light display and to help fill those food pantries okay to the viewers please stay tuned to the video sheboygan county a great place to live and work the blessings of our county are numerous beautiful surroundings the lakes the kettles the parks and most importantly a compassionate community that cares deeply about the needs of others we are fortunate to have individual citizens organizations and businesses who care about the future of our local communities there are over 9 000 individuals that live in sheboygan county whose income is below the poverty level these are local families children are elderly individuals that live in our own local neighborhoods many of these 9 000 individuals are struggling to find the resources to feed their families every month because of local organizations and generous individuals like you the sheboygan county food bank and local area food pantries are helping families obtain the food they need across the county from sheboygan to random lake from plymouth the sheboygan falls the pantries staffed by volunteers and operated by organizations such as salvation army and numerous churches are vital to helping feed our families in need the pantries support serving an average of 2 000 individuals each month many of these individuals and families are working full or part-time jobs or are elderly and receiving social security among the many organizations stepping forward to help are the rotary clubs of sheboygan county through their holiday making spirits bright like show the four rotary clubs of sheboygan county hope to collect over 30 000 pounds of food all the food collected will be distributed to county food pantries we invite you and your family to experience the wonders of the thanksgiving and christmas holiday season by driving through the making spirits bright light show located in gorgeous evergreen park on the northeast side of sheboygan the light extravaganza offers attractive displays and images of holiday season dressed up in lights so please join us your neighbors your friends in supporting what we hope to make an annual tradition rotary making spirits bright gives you an opportunity to support others in need please help make this project a reality with your financial support join one of our corporate sponsors in supporting this community project i believe that as the economy has had its bumps in the road over the last few years that we are seeing a need in food pantries unlike any time in my memory really and as a grocery retailer we feel that we need to play a part in in helping them stock their needs and do whatever we can to facilitate a growing need that doesn't seem to be backing down very much like mark and their families at fest for foods we hope that you will help this project with a donation the rotary model is service above self we hope to make the making spirits bright project the embodiment of that creed please join us in making sheboygan county a wonderful place to live for all its citizens