At the July 16, 2024 meeting, President Bill Gaddis did a recap of the club this past Rotary year (membership, Polio Plus donations, The Rotary Foundation (TRF) donations and EPAM donations), John Goergen presented information regarding the Eden Prairie AM Rotary grants given to organizations during this past year. Bill then provided information regarding his vision for our club for the new 2024-2025 Rotary year. 

 

Please see the link for the meeting powerpoint below to review the recaps of this past year and the vision for the new year!

 

 

Kris Hoplin, Executive Director of Reach Out and Read, has 20 years of experience in the nonprofit sector after attending both St. Olaf and the University of Chicago. Reach Out and Read is a program that helps increase literacy and give children a foundation for success by providing books to young people at doctor visits. The program, originally started in Boston, has been around for 35 years, and there are currently 300 participating clinics in Minnesota serving 165,000 children.

 

The program works by ensuring each child gets a brand new book upon visiting their doctor, and the book is used by the healthcare provider to help illustrate how parents should be reading and connecting with their children at home. The connection between books and visits to the doctor’s office is crucial, because even if children aren’t in school, most children are going to their doctor’s appointments. Additionally, healthcare providers are often a family’s most trusted source. Doctors can also use the books as developmental surveillance to check if children meet certain benchmarks for their age, helping with early childhood screening rates.

 

Kris Hoplin explained that a child’s first years are invaluable to their developmental success due to the millions of new neural connections their brains are forming. Hoplin points out several adverse childhood effects, or ACES, such as poverty, substance abuse, premature birth, and more whose negative effects can be combated by positive family and learning experiences such as reading with a parent or older sibling. Children who are read to more often have better emotional connections, improved language and listening skills, better future health and success, and are more likely to like reading, develop communication skills, patience, empathy, better literacy, better vocabulary, and reduced anxiety and stress. Even handling a book is good for children too young to read. Doctors and nurses, through the Mirrors and Windows initiative, are handing out books with more diverse themes and characters due to the observed benefits of children seeing role models that look like themselves in books.