Posted by Sanjiv Prabhakaran on Nov 01, 2019
 
Herb was the "Acting" President today (despite being very sick) since President Venky was not present.
 
 
 
Today we had Paul Butler deliver his 1-minute talk about why he joined Rotary. He was inspired when his daughter won a $10,000 Rotary scholarship and later became President at her Rotary club. He said it took an army to convince him to become President of the club and also really enjoyed his visit to the International Convention in Birmingham, England. He said that Rotary has done a lot for his family.
 
 
We also had the opportunity to listen to a wonderful testimony from Kirk Collins about his Rotary involvement and the project he worked on in Malawi. It involved donating 46 wheel chairs from our club and sending school supplies to a school in Malawi. Our club still sends $2,000 every year for school supplies. Charles Foster visited him in the Bay area and recorded his testimony.
 
## "Urban Corps’ Dual Focus Program" by Meghan Reed
 
 
Meghan, an Arkansas native, moved to San Diego earlier this year. Her background lies in nonprofit work and literary writing. She is the Development Coordinator at Urban Corps, writing foundational and corporation grants. In addition, she also takes care of the organizations’ marketing needs. She started her talk with a video about Urban Corps' program and some stories about some of the graduates from their program. That was very touching to see the hard work the participants go through. Urban Corps was started 30 years ago on July 20, 1989.
 
Their program trains disadvantaged children to get an education and work and stay positive and out of trouble. Many work at various Urban Corp programs. Incarcerated people get a second chance through job training. Urban Corps helps them with securing necessary certificates, driver license, etc. They run a Charter School so the students can get a proper high school degree.
 
Some of the jobs that they do involve painting public walls to get rid of graffiti. Their statistics shows that the students have painted walls with cumulative area that equals about 2000 Qualcomm stadiums!
 
They have about 220 students (ages 18-26 years) active in schools at a time and over 400 graduate annually. They have multiple campuses in San Diego. Their signature program is called Corps-To-Career that runs an internship program whereby they recruit employers who are willing to employ Corps graduates as an intern with the goal of becoming an employee after the intern period is over. Their Charter School currently has over 200 Corps members in the program.
 
 
At the end, DMSB Club Acting President Herb Liberman presented the speaker with the Joshua certificate that represents our club DMSB donating school supplies to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.
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