Events

Attorney Marshall H. Tanick of the Twin Cities law firm of Meyer Njus Tanick will make his annual presentation to the Rotary Club. He will summarize nine of the most momentous decisions of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court during its recently concluded 2023-24 term, including freedom of speech, gun safety and ownership, reproductive rights, and, of course, a trio of Trump-related topics and their impact in Minnesota.

This meeting takes place at Minneapolis Marriott West in St. Louis Park in combination with the St. Louis Park Sunrise Club and St. Louis Park Noon Club.

St. Louis Park and Golden Valley Rotary Clubs invite you to join us for this immersive experience. Everyone is welcome.
The eradication of polio is one of Rotary’s longest standing and most significant efforts. Rotary International has helped immunize more than 2.5 billion children against polio in 122 countries. Polio cases have been reduced by 99.9% worldwide and Rotarians won't stop until the disease is gone for good.

The global fight to end polio may seem distant and abstract. However, with the use of virtual reality (VR) technology, this distance can be bridged. Polio's Last Mile, a VR experience developed by REM5 Studios based in St. Louis Park, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is not just an immersive experience. It's a powerful tool that aims to educate, engage, and most importantly, inspire its users to join the fight against polio.
 
Come learn where we’re at in the fight. What’s preventing us from passing the finishing line and eradicating polio globally for good and the work that is being done to ensure we get there. REM 5 will be with us taking us on the journey of The Last Mile, an immersive experience where you will feel the heartbeat of hope, resilience, and unwavering determination of the heroes on the frontlines to end polio once and for all. Featured at Rotary International in Singapore.
 
This event is open to the public. Please join us. The cost of the event is $25 per person. Tickets include a buffet style lunch. Attendees are invited to donate to Rotary's PolioPlus campaign. Currently, donations will be matched 2 to 1 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
 
Register soon! Registration closes August 26 or earlier if we reach the room capacity.

Martin Graefe is the senior group director and director of the Concordia Language Training Center. He has been on staff at Concordia Language Villages since 1995, serving eight years as director for year-round programs and ten years as the associate director for operations.

Martin holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Dakota and a master’s degree in business administration from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Martin has been a Rotarian for over 25 years, serving as the club president for Bemidji Rotary in 2012-13. He lives in Bemidji with his wife Lisa. The youngest of their three children spent a year in Stockholm Sweden as a Rotary Youth Exchange Student.

We will use our noon meeting as a service activity and use our Golden Valley Notecards to write letters to:

• Someone you know who could use a note of cheer.
• Someone you know who should become a GV Rotary Club member.
• A child in the hospital.
• Karen, a 91 year old Minnesotan whose family members are all out of state.
• Deployed Troops, Recruit Graduates + Veterans 

We’ll be sure to have writing utensils and a method for mailing the cards out.

Need not be present to “win”; follow the linked guidelines in the newsletter to do this at home. 

This could be done for a whole family to do or a rainy-day activity for little ones with age-appropriate messages and drawings.

Karl Erickson, Youth Programs Manager, Elpis Enterprises

Before joining Elpis as our Woodworking Program Manager in September of 2022, Karl worked as a teacher at Higher Ground Academy in St. Paul, MN. There, he authored and coordinated a “No Child Left Inside” MN DNR grant which helped with nature-based exploration (primarily ice fishing) and maintained partnerships with Tickets 4 Kids, Free Bikes 4 Kids, Ardent Outdoor Group, and Adam Thielen Foundation Charities. These experiential activities empowered students inside and outside of their traditional school days with non/traditional experiences. Other relevant work experiences include being a floral box builder and social media marketer for Wholesale Wicker Baskets, LLC. He is also a two-time Iraq War Veteran who served seven years in the Minnesota Army National Guard.

Morgan Schafer, ReThink Disposable Zero Waste Organizer and Sasha Lewis-Norelle, Environmental Health and Justice Organizer

Morgan received her bachelor's degree in environmental science in 2024 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus on social, political, and economic perspectives. She grew up moving across the Midwest, finally landing in London, England before attending college back home. She now works as the Zero Waste Organizer with the ReThink Disposable project to work with local businesses and institutions across Minnesota with the goal of stopping trash before it starts.

Morgan first became interested in advocacy through a program for teens at her local Planned Parenthood, led by the belief that every person is deserving of respect and compassion. Later, during her time at UW Madison, she learned about the strong correlation between social justice and environmental issues and their pervasiveness across the globe. She developed a strong sense of responsibility for protecting the planet and has found a passion for bettering the world, particularly in fields of social justice, climate change, and sustainability.

Morgan is excited to put this passion and experience to work to create a safe, healthy, and beautiful future for our planet and its people, starting here in Minnesota.

Sasha is the Environmental Health and Justice Organizer in Minnesota. He works with local communities and allies to advance environmental justice through education, advocacy, and community organizing.

Sasha graduated from Macalester College in 2021 with a degree in Environmental Studies and a biology emphasis. He grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and has loved nature and the environment since he was young. he has a strong passion for changing our society for the better, particularly around environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability.

Sasha first got involved with environmental advocacy through student activism while attending Macalester. He worked on a campaign to divest the school's endowment from fossil fuels, joined the Sunrise Movement to fight for a Green New Deal, and volunteered with MN350 in the fight to stop the Line 3 Pipeline. Environmental activism and organizing are now his passion, and he's always excited for new opportunities to create a better world.

https://cleanwater.org/

Khalique Rogers is a graduate of Gordon Parks High School, St. Paul College, and has been asked to provide featured presentations at conferences not only in Minnesota, but also in other states. Rogers has co-authored columns in the Star Tribune and MinnPost. He’s been asked to testify a number of time at Minnesota legislative committees focused on helping reduce the number of youth and family experiencing homelessness. He personally experienced homelessness as a youngster. He served as the leader of a successful effort to convert a trash-filled vacant lot in St. Paul into a beautiful playground. Rogers has a deep belief in the importance of having young people be present and have opportunities to help shape policy.

Joe Nathan has been an inner city public school aide, teacher, and administrator. He was selected to coordinate a National Governors Association project, Time for Results: the Governors 1991 Report on Education. More than 30 state legislatures and several Congressional Committees have asked him to testify on various education issues. Student, parent, and professional groups have given him awards for his work. Nathan has helped write several major laws, including Post Secondary Enrollment Options and the nation’s first charter public school law. He served as a local PTA president in St. Paul, and a member of the Minnesota State PTA board. He has written two books named “must read” by the American School Board journal, along with a third, and edited a fourth. More than 30 newspapers including Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Atlanta Constitution, and Detroit News have published guest columns he wrote. Nathan has written proposals that generated more than $33 million from a variety of national, regional, and local foundations, government agencies, and companies.

Between 1989 and 2004 he wrote a weekly column carried by three of Minnesota’s four largest daily papers. He now writes a twice-a-month column carried regularly by about 20 suburban and rural Minnesota newspapers. The column also has appeared on local and national websites. Nathan has appeared on more than 400 television and radio programs including “The Today Show”, “Good Morning America”, "McNeil/Lehrer News Hour”, and “All Things Considered”. He earned a B.A. from Carleton, MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota. Nathan has been married for 46 years to a retired St. Paul Public School teacher. The Nathan’s three children all attended and graduated from St. Paul Public Schools.  Their five granddaughters also attend St. Paul Public Schools.

Beyond The Yellow Ribbon Quad Communities is a grassroots citizen group that engages the communities of Golden Valley, Crystal, New Hope, and Robbinsdale in support of military members, veterans, and their families. It joins nearly 200 Minnesota cities, counties, and businesses already proclaimed Beyond the Yellow Ribbon.

Beyond the Yellow Ribbon is a comprehensive program that creates awareness for the purpose of connecting military service members and their families with community support, training, services, and resources.

Not a meeting to be missed! The Golden Valley Rotary Club members will have a discussion on membership, leadership opportunities, grants, and future projects, etc. You'll definitely want to attend this Rotary meeting to contribute to the important Club conversations. Look forward to seeing you there!

William Heathershaw's life was very much focused on community service when he was in college by overextending himself in student organizations. Volunteering for the 2008 Beijing Olympics was his last real volunteer engagement for quite a few years while he lived in Beijing. Then later in the Bay Area as life became much more focused on career. Despite growing up in a lower middle-class situation, William is blessed that he's been provided the opportunities to experience so much in life including traveling to nearly 40 countries on four continents. He's spent most of the past eight years focusing on his own small businesses, though he decided to recently join a decades-old family-owned business in Plymouth within the business technologies industry – their primary offerings are business telecommunications and an emergency management platform for school districts, college campuses, governments, healthcare systems, and large venues. William is also dedicated to promoting the life-changing college and CTE scholarships offered by the Horatio Alger Association, one of the largest private funders of needs-based scholarship – they changed his life in 2004 when he was one of two recipients that year in Iowa for a National Scholarship. For the past five years, William has been alongside his now life partner (wife), Ann, and they have a beautiful and spunky toddler Josie who somehow simultaneously drains and recharges them.

Karen Wojahn was raised in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin School of Business with a degree in Accounting. She worked in government and public accounting and has actively volunteered with many non-profits, including the Embroiderers’ Guild of America. In her spare time, she enjoys embroidery, traveling, reading, golf, and cross-country skiing. Her love of embroidery has developed over many years.

In April, 2024, Karen and 40 Rotary E-Club Global Travelers and their families/friends went on an amazing trip to Egypt. They combined service and learned about grant opportunities with incredible sight-seeing.

Regan Birr is the founder of the Lupus Research Foundation, along with her husband, Todd Birr.

Regan is the executive director of the LRF team, comprised of people passionately working towards a cure.

Regan is a lupus survivor. With a diagnosis several years ago of severe kidney involvement due to lupus, she was facing a grim future. Her health needed immediate attention. The treatment was 2.5 years of a breast cancer chemotherapy called Cytoxan (even though Regan did not have breast cancer). The goal was to suppress her over-active immune system and prevent it from attacking her kidneys. Early diagnosis, and the right diagnosis, saved her life: the Cytoxan, along with high-dose prednisone, put her into remission and her lab results eventually returned to fairly normal levels. However, she still felt very ill. Daily, she experienced severe joint pain, the kind that kept her up at night and caused her to walk with a cane, and she dealt with extreme fatigue. Her fatigue was such that trips to the grocery store would exhaust her, and all she could do was buy groceries – not unload the car. Some days a load of laundry was too much; other days making a meal was all she could do. This period of time was mentally grueling. She is a mechanical engineer, and is always analyzing and problem-solving, so having a weak body only amplified the frustration and at times she was feeling depression and desperation. Her journey towards health took almost a decade. But because of the early diagnosis, along with diet change and exercise, she did recover, and now enjoys a high quality of life and remission. But she realizes that most others aren’t so lucky. That is why she is passionate about finding a cure, because that’s the best way she can help people living with lupus.

Together, with Todd, who is a competitive curler, they are focusing on the NEXT 5 years towards a cure. For more information about Regan and Todd’s teamwork towards a cure, visit “Lupus Spiel USA” and “Curling & Lupus”.

Dr. Teri Staloch has a long and distinguished career in K-12 education, which includes previous experience as an English teacher, assistant superintendent at Osseo Area Schools from 2012 to 2015, all the way up to a district superintendent, serving at Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools between 2015 and 2022. Most recently she was the Director of Engagement and Strategic Partnerships for PartnerED Consultants and a Senior Educational Consultant for SitelogIQ. She began as superintendent of the Robbinsdale Area Schools on July 1, 2024.