 in the studio here at Davis Media Access. I'm your host, Emily Merton, and today joining me are guests from the Rebecca Lodge. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having us. Why don't you start out by introducing yourselves and telling me a little bit about what you do at the Rebecca Lodge? Well, I'm Leah Rosenberg. I've been with the Rebecca's for about 10 years. I'm a past grand. And we are now getting ready to do a big fundraiser for the Children's Home in Gilroy. Great. And I'm Mary Superacke. I've been a Rebecca for approximately five years. And I've had her as my noble grand in the past, and I chair the Community Support Committee. And the Rebecca's are an organization used to be for the women of the odd fellow members, but now it's, you can be either a male or female and be in the lodge. And our focus is foster care and helping children that have serious needs. And we do a lot of different fundraisers during the year. One of them is breakfast with Santa, just to let you know. So yeah. That's great to know. So tell me a little bit more about what the Rebecca are exactly and how it's connected to the odd fellows. How does it all kind of connect? Well, Davis is lucky in that we have two lodges. We have the Davis Odd Fellow Lodge, and we have the Davis Rebecca Lodge, both active lodges in Davis. And our lodges are with members of both lodges, whether you're male or female, you're happy, everyone's welcome to join the both lodges. And we like to have taken a focus on foster kids and emancipated kids. And that's where our money and our focus is going. What the Rebecca's and the Odd Fellows do, like Leah was saying, we now have a mix of male and female, both are service organizations. And these service organizations, they want to bring people together. So not only are you helping another organization by doing an activity to bring them some support, you're also bringing the community together so they are educated about what we do and about the program, instead of just sending everything is now on the internet. This way people come together, they have fun. They get to know each other within their own community and they get to work together towards a certain goal that then goes back out into the community. So basically that's what the Odd Fellows are. Odd Fellows and Rebecca's were considered odd, right? Yes. Because they were helping people at a time in our history when a lot of organizations beyond the churches were helping people. So we're basically a service organization. Okay, well I think that's really wonderful that you guys have events instead of, it's so easy to set up just to go fund me or a way to just raise money online or something, but I really understand how this brings the community together. So why did you choose this particular home to fundraise for? Well, in the beginning there was, the Rebecca's had a children's home in every community or in every state. This is the last one in all the United States, the Rebecca Children's Home in Gilroy. They work with children that are on a level 14 level. So they're hard to place kids and it needs support from all the Rebecca lodges in California and we've chosen this as our project to support them. They have many different projects going and we wanna make sure they're well funded. That's very important. I'm so glad you guys are doing this. So how are you raising the money so far? Well, can I take on just a little bit more? Oh, of course. For people so that they know and then we'll tell you about that because that's gonna be so much fun. Some of what Leah was just scratching the surface on, some of the programs that the Rebecca service and the Rebecca home does and I just wanted to let you know, they house an adoption center so that Rebecca Children's Services and other organizations can come together and help the foster youth find placement or actually have adoption centers. They have the Culinary Academy now which is a big project. The Culinary Academy, it's for youth 15 to 25 and they are in a class. It's part of the hospitality industry and it's a 10-week course and they have to be there three hours or three hour sessions twice a week. Not only are they taking the class, they have to wear the appropriate attire so that they get this whole self-esteem about I am doing something for myself and once they graduate, they're helped with placement and then they go out and they have jobs. So that's wonderful. They learn all different culinary skills. There's also the Family Resource Center because sometimes the children and the families, there's a struggle and with the Family Resource Center, they can come there and learn ways to be together. We're focusing on what they call foster care but the Rebecca's actually call it and I just love this, family linkage. You're linking people together so that they become a family because that's part of the program with the Rebecca's is to make it work and if for some reason a young person is unable to be with a particular family, then the home, and it's a co-housing population, the home then gives them all the support, the health support, the mental health support, the staffing is there's nurses, there's psychiatrists, of course you know you saw the Culinary Institute housing skills for then setting up your own housing eventually, so there's a lot of that. Then they have the Hospital Diversion Program so you don't have to be an emancipated youth going into another facility with no family for healthcare. You can be at the children's home and get your hospital care that you need. They also have the Davis Independent Study, they have a school in three different locations in California, then they have the Outpatient Mental Health and Prevention and Education, it goes on and on and on and the Residential Treatment which is what we're focusing on again, it's like she was saying for the Residential Treatment 24 hour service, seven days a week, on-site psychiatric care, pharmaceutical services, licensed CCLs and all these different therapists, so it goes on and on and on and on. So there's so much that's happening with the Rebekah Children's Home and the Rebekah Children's Services. I just want to give everybody an overview of there's a lot that goes into it and they are accredited, they've been accredited since 2006 and the Rebekah Services and the house was formed in 1897. Wow. So it's over 115 years old. It's still here helping. It's the last one. And it started out as an orphanage as they all of them did in each state as an orphanage. But as they've gone by-by, we've picked up other services and community needs to support these kids. Yes, well hopefully we can all raise awareness for this and keep it going because it sounds like such a wonderful program. But it does sound like it costs a lot of money to support because there are a lot of youth who need this help in this outreach. So how are you going about that? Well, we've had many different programs but the one we're focusing on right now is called Bollywood for Foster Care. Bollywood for Family Linkage. I'll find, I think we have a video, right? Oh, that would be wonderful. Do we want to show that video? Yes, I'll show the video. Don't you talk about what's going to happen on April 2nd? April 2nd. Well, when you arrive at the Oddfellow Lodge on April 2nd, there'll be two floors bustling with activity. On the bottom floor, the lower hall, as we call it, is going to be an Indian buffet made by Mary Phillips and her cooking staff. I'm so looking forward to it. Be 98% vegetarian and then she's gonna have chicken mansala. So you'll be able to have wonderful Indian dinner downstairs in places to sit and so on and so forth. And then you'll be ascended up to the dance room, okay? And up there, Prashant and his dance company, Prashant is, he's a Cornell graduate. He went into business and he decided that he wanted to share his culture. And this is how it came about, sharing his culture through dance. And now he goes around and does these programs for people. Wonderful. So his dance troupe will be teaching about eight different Bollywood dances. So they'll teach us the dance and then we'll get to do it. So upstairs will be a complete dance floor and you'll be transformed in many ways and you'll be learning these dances and he's doing all the music through tapes. He's picking out, I told him this was a family friendly one. So it's not gonna be like Techno the night before he's gonna be in San Francisco and that's gonna be totally Techno kind of. But this is gonna be more of a family friendly one. And really help people understand what is Bollywood? What is the culture? Where is it coming from? I love the whole idea that in a Bollywood movie or Bollywood experience, if things aren't going well, it's gonna continue forever until everyone is happy. So movies could go for hours and hours. And that's why it says you will laugh, you will dance, you will fall in love because it's about having a very good time. Also, we will have different areas where people can look at items that we'll have there for special activity. Then you have to come and find out what those activities are. Some of them involve king's tickets for the next season. Oh. Yeah, I know. And box seats, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it'll be colorful. Some of my friends are going to come and help decorate. We're gonna have some saris and different outfits that people want to. You don't have to dress up, but if you want to, we'll have some laying around. And we'll also have beer and wine for sale at the event and soda and water and things like that too. Wonderful. So when you're at the event, how can you learn more about what it's going to be supporting because it sounds like a lot of fun, but you're also doing a lot of good. Oh yeah, we'll be talking about it. There'll be some downstairs. And then Parshant has graciously offered to talk about it in between, telling about it. I'll be there. I don't think you'll be there, Leah, right? You're gonna be, you'll be at another function that day. Yeah, I'll be at another arm pillow function. Yeah, she has to be at a big gathering at another location. I'll be there, there'll be other people there that will be talking about the Rebekah Children's Home. We will have a poster, and then our wonderful secretary, Nicole, who couldn't be here today because she's at a conference, she's going to have a little mini video looping that we'll have, so things like that. Yeah, there'll be ads all around about what the Rebekah Children's Home is about. Awesome, so is there a certain particular aspect of the home that this fundraiser will be helping or just all around? I'm glad you brought that up, because we're focusing on the facility itself where it houses the young people, the kids that are there, because they need to have a nice place to live. We want to make sure that the facility has the updates that it needs, like any building. This is a beautiful building. If you go on site, it's very Spanish and it's got this stucco outside, except it's really old. It was built in 1897, so we want to just make sure that it's healthy, healthy environment and all of that and it has what it needs to make the residents safe. Also, any monies that, excuse me, any donations and so on and so forth, that they have that they're given, they can utilize it if they don't need to do any repairs, then it will go into the programs I talked about to make sure that the staffing ratio is what it should be. Make sure that the young people that are there, they have the therapies that they need and sometimes it's one-on-one therapy, sometimes it could be a play therapy or a group therapy. You don't know because it's individual care that each one, they have their own individual care plan. And then the other part is what will happen when they're discharged. With this particular part that we are doing our program for is also to help them when they have housing. Do they need a bed? Do they need a couch? Do they need a rice maker? Whenever they have those. Because just imagine how tough it is as a person with a family, if you are disenfranchised and you don't have the strong family support, even if you've gone through this particular areas for those that are having more difficult time, we're trying to make it so that they succeed. Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, this money will really help support them and in a fun way where you could get involved, you can go to this event. If you wanna know more about it, you can go to the website that's on screen and there's a link to all about the fundraiser. So that is davislodge.org. Thank you so much for talking about this today. It's very important and it's a good way to have fun if you want something to do, support a good cause. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. And I have a little gift for davis media access, a couple of our entry, little like the golden tickets. Oh, thank you. And they're at common ground. Awesome. If anybody's interested. Sounds like it's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah, and I appreciate you having us here today. Oh yeah, I appreciate you being here. If you wanna see more videos of davis media access, you can log on to dctv. davismedia.org. I was your host, Emily Merton, and thank you for watching.