Here is what you missed at this week's Rotary meeting (by Zoom)!
Meeting Recap 04/2/20
While we have decided not to hold physical meetings through April 23rd, we are holding virtual ones through Zoom. Check the weekly email for a link to participate.
25 participants including guests logged on this week.
Guests: Trinh Truong, Zoe Shannon and Diane Berry
Share Rotary:
President Joe shared his “What has Rotary done to make you proud” segment. Highlights were:
- Congratulations to Travis Rabbers, who was awarded ‘Rotarian of the Month’ for the month of March!
Announcements:
- PP Dom Passalacqua updated us on the status of our Rotaract internship. The internship at CABVI has been suspended until September due to COVID-19.
- Our first annual Service Above Self Gala has been postponed until June of 2021. A program to award Service Above Self recipients is still hoped to be had during a regularly scheduled weekly meeting in June.
Program: Keven Marken introduced our speaker Trinh Truong, joining us via zoom from Cambodia. Trinh Truong, a Vietnamese refugee, was resettled in Utica at the age of three. She and her mother joined her grandparents, who had already been resettled here. She graduated Proctor High School as valedictorian (2015) and went on to study at Yale University, graduating last May with a B.A. in Political Science, cum laude and with distinction, and with a certificate in Human Rights Studies from Yale Law School. She is currently a Parker Huang Postgraduate Fellow (Yale) in Phnom Penh, and will be attending Oxford in the fall, where she will pursue a Master of Science degree in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.
Trinh’s presentation was titled “Around the World in Utica: A Gold Standard for Refugee Resettlement”. She gave us a comprehensive overview of resettlement, around the world versus Utica’s approach. 17.6% of Utica’s population are refugees; that’s 1 in 5 people. These figures are from the 2010 census and do not include first-generation Americans.
Utica is the gold standard for a few reasons. One being that we are a one-stop-shop in terms of helping our refugee population. Other reasons are due to our cheap housing, entry level job availability, culturally responsive schools and colleges and community programming.
Next Week’s Program: Keep an eye out for Joe’s weekly email for a link to join via Zoom again next week!