Keene Elm City Rotary

06/05/2026

Keene Elm City Rotary is pleased to announce the awardees of this year’s scholarships!

Ken Jue Scholarship: Elizabeth Burnell, studying massage therapy at River Valley Community College

Unsung Hero Scholarships:
-Shelley Clough, studying message therapy at River Valley Community College
-Harmoney Brown, studying elementary education at Emmanuel College
-Matthew Behn, studying for Masters Physician Assistant at Franklin Pierce University
-Genevieve Geronimo, studying message therapy at River Valley Community College
-Ava Moore, studying nursing at Keene State College

In addition, we celebrated reaching this spring’s goal of funding the Ken Jue Scholarship with $28,000 which will enable us to guarantee a minimum $1,000 annual award.

We wish our awardees the best in their endeavors and thank the public and club members who donated to KECR’s scholarship funds!

05/29/2026

This week our speaker was club member and Director of New Hampshire Dance Institute, Kristen Leach. Our club’s Allocation Grant helps to pay for the guest teaching artist from National Dance Institute in New York City that works with students at NHDI’s summer camp. Kristen shared why dance is important as curriculum in schools.

In early 1980s Jacques d”Amboise started National Dance Institute in schools develop discipline in students. He realized dance needed to be in the school day so that it is accessible to EVERY student. New Hampshire Dance Institute is the first of 13 affiliates and are now celebrating 40 years of teaching.

The students are “chasing excellence”. They learn to show the world their best efforts in other disciplines in the life, the benefits of delayed gratification, how to get comfortable with failure and learn from it, mindfulness, accepting correction, earned confidence, how to work hard, you have to do your part and not sit on the bench, that hard work can be fun, and success can look different for each person.

The narration and script for the NHDI annual presentations are written by Kristen. This year show feature a young person attempt to climb Mount Monadnock. The moral was about not reaching a goal and learning to try again.

05/21/2026

Phil Gargan was our speaker this week. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and moved to New Hampshire 14 years ago.

He spoke about some of his trips as a guide down the Zambezi River, the fourth longest river in the world. Phil would guide canoe trips from Lake Kariba toward the ocean, for ten days at a time. They would sleep with a canvas stretched between canoes, without protection from animals, on beaches and islands along the river.

On one trip with ten people, he heard lion calls in the middle of the night. After hearing the calls getting closer for half hour, he woke the group. Soon they heard low growls circling them. They had no guns, only an Icarus Rocket and Marine flares for emergency notification. He gathered these together, along with pots and pans for noise making. The group stayed awake through the night as the lion circled them. At dawn he found from the tracks that there were in fact four lions circling within 40 feet of their camp.

On another trip he led four people close to a bull elephant. After several minutes of viewing, two people started talking as they began to move away. The elephant charged and one man ran so fast that he ran out of his shoes. A year later, he found one the shoes, badly damaged by hyenas chewing on it. He mailed it to the owner who was then living in England, with a joking note that he should not litter while on safari.

Phil showed a photo of how they protected themselves from crocodiles by tying canoes together to create a barrier from open water while they fished and bathed.

His book,“ Zimbabwe Memories,”is available on Amazon.

05/14/2026

Thanks to Alana Fiero from Freitag Marketing for telling us about the company she works for and a bit about herself this morning. In addition to being the Board Chair of The Hannah Grimes Center, she leads the annual Taste of Keene Food Festival via the Keene Young Professionals Network!

We were pleased to have someone as well connected in the Keene community chat with us this morning! Thx, Alana! 🙌🏻

05/08/2026

This week Chip Chapman
Talked to us about the Gilsum Rock Swap which is celebrating its 60th year. Local interest in rocks and minerals started because Gilsum was a mining town for mica for wood stove windows in 1810’s. It was discovered that the town had a number of other minerals . Production in mica peaked in WWII when it was used as an insulator for electronics.

The rock swap attracts 7,000-9,000 people over the weekend. Donations to the swap, organized by a 501c3, generates several thousand dollars annually for Gilsum recreation activities. The swap includes pancake breakfast, chicken BBQ and ham and bean dinner with 80 different pies, book sale and other events that support other community organizations. They are seeking volunteers to assist with parking control, gates and information booth for four hour shifts. This year’s sale is June 27 & 28. Those interested in volunteering should call or text Chip at 603-995-6184.

05/05/2026

You are very welcome, Wi******er School!! Thanks again for being such gracious hosts and showing full participation! Enjoy your new sneakers and we hope to see you in September for the Kids DeMar! 👟 🙌🏻

05/05/2026

🙌Thanks to last week's speaker, Wayne Dunham of Clear Path for Veterans New England. He works in their NH office, which was founded in 2023. They aim to create a community that understands and supports the journey home for Veterans and their families and inspires other communities to do the same. Thank you, Wayne! 👏

For more info, visit: https://www.clearpathne.org/

04/24/2026

This week’s speakers were Matthew & Elizabeth Meyer Bolton , Founders of the non/profit film making organization, Salt Project. They started as film makers for the progressive arm of the United Church of Christ, eventually filming for non-profits, including work for Obama Foundation and Maria Shriver Foundation. They’ve won seven regional Emmys so far. They specialize in films that run between 1 minute and 30 minutes.

Their presentation included the showing of one their films which won a Regional Emmy award for Environmental Science, “Night Song”and Jane Kenyon’s the poem “Otherwise,” which shown on PBS and was created as a fundraiser to preserving Kenyon’s former home, Eagle Pond Farm.

SALT is an Emmy Award winning, not-for-profit production company dedicated to the craft of visual storytelling. When we die, we want folks to say we left the world…

04/23/2026

We were so pleased to be able to award a Paul Harris Fellow while on sneaker delivery at Troy Elementary School yesterday. Congratulations Mrs. Wichland! 🎉 🙌🏻 🏆

Troy School is honored also to have a Paul Harris Fellow on staff! Congratulations to Mrs. Wichland who received the Keene Elm City Rotary’s highest honor for her support of the sneaker/Demar Marathon project since it began!! Congratulations to Mrs. Wichland..

04/22/2026

Last Thursday was great! 🙌🏻 First, we awarded another Paul Harris Fellow, this time to long time Keene resident and Rotary Club of Keene member, Peter Hansel. Congratulations and thank you for your commitment and service to Keene! 🏆

Then, Peter and Wink Faulkner gave us an update on the Citizens for Keene State College, which is working on minimizing the impact of decisions being made at the College by the University System of New Hampshire. Thanks to them for taking on this important project along with many other local citizens and business leaders.