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Speakers 2004–05

Date Speaker, Organization, Topic
July 14, 2004 Nadia Tarzi, founder and Vice President, Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology (APAA) and member, Rotary Club of San Francisco (#2 Club). APAA is dedicated to the archaeology and cultural heritage of Afghanistan. APAA’s goal is to bring understanding and raise awareness thus ensuring the promotion of the Afghan archaeological and cultural heritage through its teaching in schools and public venues across the world including in Afghanistan, in the Afghan and multi-cultural Bay Area community, as well as promote and assist in the education of the international public about the inherent value of archaeological treasures to cultural identity, and to specifically focus on the plight of Afghan people regarding the loss of their cultural heritage. Finally, APAA is concerned with the lack of professional training in the sciences of archaeology, restoration and conservation and aims at providing thorough assistance in these areas. The slide-illustrated presentation is titled “Afghanistan, an archaeological journey.”
July 21, 2004 Eric Shapira, District Governor, Rotary District 5150, speaking on the meaning of life.
July 28, 2004 Lou Bartolini, past district governor of Rotary District 5150. Lou is a native San Franciscan and has lived in Marin County for over 47 years. He has been a member of the Board of the Marin Symphony for sixteen years and served as its president for five years. He serves on the Board of the Association of California Symphony League. He is treasurer of The Marin Community Health Foundation, which serves both Marin General and Novato Community Hospitals. He has been a member of the board of Westamerica Bank since 1991 and serves on their Audit Committee. He is past president and current member of Marin Forum. A Rotarian for 21 years, he has served on various club and district committees, as president of the Rotary Club of San Rafael in 1992, then as district governor in 1996–97. He chaired PETS in 1998 and has been an instructor at PETS on club operations for the past five years. He is a six-time Paul Harris Fellow and a member of Rotary International’s Bequest Society. In 1997 he received the California Transplant Donor Network Volunteer of the Year Award for his work on organ donor awareness. He is district chair for the Rotary Organ Donor Awareness Program, which is his subject.
August 4, 2004 Ellen Schell, RN, Ph.D., International Programs Director, Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance (GAIA). With GAIA since 2001, Ellen Schell coordinates all GAIA international projects, including training conferences for African religious leaders of several denominations and faiths, and the GAIA congregational partnership program, which matches U.S. religious congregations to specific African orphan care, youth HIV prevention, home-based care, women’s empowerment, and stigma reversal projects “on the ground.” Prior to coming to GAIA, she was the Project Director at UCSF for two NIH-funded projects related to ethnography and behavior, and was a research assistant on a UCSF-funded project devoted to health care assessment. She has held teaching, research, and clinical positions in nursing since 1981.
  Ellen Schell holds a B.A. degree from Yale, and a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from UCSF. She has received 2 National Research Service Awards by the National Center for Nursing Research, and a chancellor’s fellowship by UCSF. She is a primary or co-author of 21 articles in health care journals. She is active in her own faith community, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where her husband Donald Schell is the rector. She discussed the latest news about AIDS and the world’s efforts to control the AIDS epidemic.
August 11, 2004 Catherine Westphall, Community Relations Manager, Bay Area Rapid Transit District Earthquake Safety Program, speaking about earthquake predictions for the San Francisco Bay Area, a study of BART’s ability to withstand future major earthquakes, and the steps that BART is undertaking to strengthen the transit system. Catherine Westphall holds a degree in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working with BART’s Earthquake Safety Program, she conducted environmental assessments of federal lands and promoted programs for recycling and pollution prevention.
August 18, 2004 Gary Karp, founder, Onsight. Gary Karp is a professional trainer, delivering compelling and informative sessions on disability awareness and diversity. He is the author of Life On Wheels: For the Active Wheelchair User, widely reviewed as the definitive guide for people with disabilities. He draws from his personal experience with spinal cord injury since 1973, when he was injured in a fall from a tree at the age of eighteen. In April 2004, From There To Here: Stories of Adjustment to Spinal Cord Injury was published. This book, edited by Gary Karp, is a collection of essays by people with spinal cord injuries. His feature articles appear in New Mobility magazine, and he is a board member of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association and editor of its paper, SCI Life. Gary is sponsored in part by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.
  Onsight is in startup mode, with plans for a suite of disability awareness programs for clients of all types, large and small. The initial Manager’s Module is ninety minutes long, in an enjoyable and effective interactive format. Half-day and full-day programs are in development.
August 25, 2004 Kimberly Easson, Strategic Relationships Director, TransFair USA, a nonprofit organization and the only independent, third-party certifier of fair trade practices in the United States. Through regular visits to fair trade farmer cooperatives conducted by Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO), and partnerships with U.S. companies, TransFair verifies that the farmers who produced Fair Trade Certified™ products were paid a fair price.
  Kimberly Easson was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar in Costa Rica in 1991–1992 and has worked in the coffee industry for ten years. She is founder and president of Java Ventures, which organizes educational tours to coffee-producing regions. Previously, she was international marketing manager for Café Britt, a private coffee export company in Costa Rica. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in international business from the University of South Carolina. She is currently on the board and serves as chair of the Consumer Marketing Committee of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
September 8, 2004 Tamar Cooper, Program Director, San Francisco Beautiful. As San Francisco grows and changes, San Francisco Beautiful strives to ensure that a respect for the city’s history and natural environment is maintained. A native of San Francisco’s westside, Tamar Cooper manages several S.F. Beautiful programs related to neighborhood preservation and enhancement as well as protecting the City’s unique character. For over three years, Tamar has overseen San Francisco Beautiful’s No New Billboards program, where she has worked with city officials, staff and San Francisco communities to curb the proliferation of illegal billboards in San Francisco. Tamar helped lead the overwhelmingly successful campaign for Proposition G, a ballot measure that prohibits new billboards from being erected in San Francisco. This measure passed in 2002 with 79% of the vote. Tamar also manages San Francisco Beautiful’s Public Affairs/Civic Initiatives program, reviewing and commenting on various projects and plans that will impact San Francisco’s unique beauty and quality of life. As a member of the steering committee of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, Tamar is working towards making beautiful and educational “green” schoolyards a reality for our city’s public schools. Tamar holds a BA in World Arts and Cultures with an emphasis in the built environment and a minor in Public Policy (Urban Planning) from UCLA.
September 15, 2004 Holly Axtell, District Governor-Elect, Rotary District 5150, and member, Rotary Club of Marin Evening, speaking on the Rotary Centennial. Holly has served two years as assistant district governor and a third year as District 5150 chief of staff. She and her husband, Keith, who is also a Rotarian, have traveled to Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador to organize Rotary projects as well as spending a week with Rotary Project Amigo in Colima, Mexico. They plan to return to Ecuador this November. She has been a host counselor for an ambassadorial scholar from Argentina and for a human rights attorney from Italy who was in the first class of the Rotary Peace and Conflict Management Program. A major portion of her professional career has been spent designing and managing multi-state or nationwide career development programs. Currently, she is full-time Rotarian.
September 22, 2004 Danielle Gordon, Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2003–2004, student of English Literature, Edinburgh University, Scotland, just completed master’s degree. Danielle also spoke with us before leaving for Scotland, March 26, 2003.
September 29, 2004 Donna L. Mollenhauer, docent, San Francisco Zoo since 1997, and a member of the Board of Directors since 2000. As a docent, she conducts tours, appears at various locations throughout the zoo to answer questions about the animals, and assists with interpretative duties at special functions held by the zoo. In addition to her volunteer work at the zoo, she is the administrative director of the partnership at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. She showed slides and spoke about the “New Zoo.”
October 6, 2004 Pat Moloney, Captain, S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien. The O’Brien, a Liberty ship, was built in 1943 by the New England Shipbuilding Corp in South Portland, Maine, and is similar to hundreds of Liberty ships built by the Bechtel Company in Marinship of Sausalito. The O’Brien is berthed at Pier 45 in Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco. Pat Moloney is also executive director of the California Pilot Commission. He spoke about Liberty ships in general, the history of this ship, current operations, and upcoming sailings, including its participation in Fleet Week.
October 13, 2004 Fred Bowe, Member, Oakland Sunrise Rotary Club, spoke on Rotary cultural exchange and health missions to Ghana, China and Vietnam, where he traveled recently on a Polio Plus mission. Fred Bowe is a retired officer of the California Highway Patrol, and serves on the board of foundation dealing with autism.
October 20, 2004 Kevan Carter, executive director, Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, with many programs serving the people of the Western Addition neighborhood in San Francisco.
October 27, 2004 Sara Trott and Susan Kenna, Rita Da Cascia, a project of the Catholic Youth Organization in San Francisco. Rita da Cascia assists families with persons with AIDS. Sara Trott graduated from UC Berkeley in 1999, and spent a two years working in Washington, DC for Share Our Strength, an organization working on hunger and poverty issues. she obtained her masters in social work from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, and has been working as a case manager for Rita da Cascia for nearly a year and a half. Susan Kenna graduated from UC Davis in 2002 with a double major of communication and Spanish. Since then she worked one year with Seneca Center at a county/court school in Oakland and 6 months with Larkin Street Youth Services at a group home. She has been with CCCYO/Rita da Cascia for 6 months.
November 3, 2004 Dr. Pir S. Ebrahim Shah, M.B.B.S. M.P.H., consulting in Neuro Psyco Social Medicine. Dr. Shah, a Rotarian from Pakistan, has organized Rotary Youth Leadership Award (RYLA) programs for young people from India and Pakistan to meet and learn from each other.
November 10, 2004 Margaret Trost, founder, What If? Foundation. Margaret Trost visited Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, for the first time in 2000. She was stunned by the overwhelming poverty, but also deeply moved by the strength, determination and faith of the people she met. “I’ll never forget the eyes of the children. Their longing for a future touched my heart and I thought, ’surely there is something we can do. What if...?’” Determined to answer this question, Margaret created the What If? Foundation with the goal of providing food and education to impoverished children.
November 17, 2004 Peter Lagarias, past district governor, Rotary District 5150 and co-founder of Rotaplast, a nonprofit organization that has provided surgical repairs to over 5,000 non-U.S. children, born with cleft lips and/or cleft palates. Mr. Lagarias spoke about Rotaplast and about the Rotary Foundation.
December 1, 2004 Peter Long, Certified Flight Instructor, Outback Aviation. Mr. Long has flying since 1982, when he got his license at Moorabin Airport, Melbourne, Australia. He enjoys sharing the fun and excitment of flying and helping fellow pilots fulfill their dreams. He has been a flying instructor since March 2004. His favorite aircraft to instruct in are the Cessna 172 and Piper Warrior.
December 8, 2004 Svetlana (Lana) Kim, financial consultant and member, Rotary Club of San Francisco Golden Gate. Lana, a Korean-Russian-American, spoke on “my passion for American people.” She shared the story of her journey from Leningrad to San Francisco, and a few stories from Russian history dating from the Russian Revolution in 1905 up to 1945. She talked about Paul Harris and the meeting of Feb. 23, 1905, leading to formation of the Rotary Club of Chicago.
December 15, 2004 Lorri Ungaretti, Sunset historian, tour guide, and author of San Francisco’s Sunset District, presented slides of San Francisco’s “Outside Lands” from the time of the Gold Rush to the 1950s and beyond. Lorri Ungaretti is a native San Franciscan who spent her childhood in the Parkside District. She graduated from Lincoln High School and from San Francisco State University. She earns her living as the director of marketing publications for Golden Gate University School of Law, but her passion is San Francisco history, especially the history of the Sunset District.
  She is a San Francisco City Guide, leading a free walking tour of the Inner Sunset each month. She developed an interest in the history of the area when tried to conduct research to enrich her tour and discovered that no one had ever written about the area. Ungaretti developed a slide presentation and wrote her book, published by Arcadia Publishing in 2003. She is currently working on a history book of the neighborhood and another Arcadia photo book, this time of the Richmond District. She is a member of several San Francisco history groups, including the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society. She serves on the boards of San Francisco City Guides and the Western Neighborhoods Project.
December 22, 2004 Kris Hermes, AIDS activist, attended the Republican Convention in New York in September 2004, hoping to draw attention to the global AIDS crisis and the need for cancellation of heavily-indebted poor countries struggling to deal with AIDS. He and his colleagues were arrested. He shared about this story — both his own experience and the greater story of AIDS and the need for debt cancellation.
  Kris Hermes has been active on issues of social justice for nearly 20 years. During the first 15 years of his activist career, Kris focused on global and domestic hunger and poverty issues, including access to health care and relief from crushing debt that holds many countries mired in poverty. This work was mainly done through the grassroots citizens’ lobbying organization RESULTS. Over the last five years Kris has focused on issues around health care, and specifically access to treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS. His work in this arena, with organizations such as ACT UP Philadelphia and Health GAP, has been considerably more confrontational with the use of direct action and civil disobedience being a fundamental tactic for change. Over the years of his activist career, Kris has employed many different strategies and tactics including state and federal lobbying of public officials, working with all types of media, organizing mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, as well as first-hand research in affected areas in Africa.
  Kris is a degreed mechanical engineer who conducted much of his activism in an extracurricular way while employed in the field of engineering. Since his change to more confrontational tactics, Kris has been engaged in significant amounts of legal defense activism. In 2003, Kris left engineering to take a job as Legal Coordinator in Berkeley with Americans for Safe Access, where he still works today.
December 29, 2004 Jana Sharma, Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar to Managua, Nicaragua, shared basic information on Nicaragua, her experiences and impressions as a university student in the country, and some of her activities as an ambassador of goodwill.
  Jana is from San Mateo and worked with the San Mateo High School Interact club for all four years, where her participation included going to Ensenada to build playgrounds. She enrolled in Columbia University, majoring in environmental biology, and is also also a premed student. While studying in In New York, she worked on environmental advocacy on campus, a youth nutrition and mentorship program, and the college radio station’s jazz program. She has one year left at Columbia on her return in 2005; she took a year off to go to Managua under the Ambassadorial Scholarship, where she has been for the last five months.
January 19, 2005 Dr. Nilima Sabharwal, founder, Home of Hope. Home of Hope partners with foster homes in India that nurture orphaned and destitute children, so they may grow to be well balanced, self-sustaining members of society. Home of Hope has helped with the fight against child prostitution, child drug use, and child abuse. Dr. Sabharwal is a physician/staff pathologist at Kaiser Santa Teresa in San Jose. In 1999, she founded Home of Hope to provide financial support to existing orphanages in India.
January 26, 2005 Frank and Kathleen Mayhew, members, Sebastopol Rotary Club and seven-year participants, Rotary Project Amigo. In 2000, the Mayhews went to the Rotary International Convention in Buenos Aires and met Ugandan Rotarian John Okumu. Three years later, at John’s request, they visited Uganda to look at potential medical, clean water, self-sufficiency and educational projects with several Ugandan Rotary clubs. They took with them Sebastopol physician Dr. Richard Powers and his nurse, wife Charlene to evaluate the medical projects. After almost three weeks in Uganda they returned with many worthwhile projects. The talk is titled: “Lend a Hand in Uganda.”
February 2, 2005 Ken Kobre and Betsy Brill. Ken Kobre, free-lance journalist and photojournalism professor at San Francisco State University, presented a slideshow of Indonesia, including Banda Aceh, the worst-hit area of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004. Ken and his wife Betsy spent a sabbatical year examining and writing about the international microcredit movement, visiting Indonesia, India, and other developing countries in Asia and Africa. In December 2004, Ken and Betsy returned to Indonesia for a vacation that suddenly was interrupted by the tsunami. Ken diverted part of his time off to fly to Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Betsy shared about Yayasan IDEP Foundation, an Indonesian NGO that is providing direct aid in Aceh.
  Ken is the author of Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach, used by 125 colleges and universities. In addition to teaching, Ken also is an active free-lance photojournalist. Betsy is the former editor of San Franciso Business magazine and was a feature writer and photographer for the Houston Post. Since 1989, she has worked independently for Bay Area companies as a writer, editor and publication designer. She has edited and designed the last four editions of Ken’s textbook. She and Ken are co-authors of the 7th and 8th editions of the classic basic photography textbook, Photography.
  Betsy Brill presented us a slideshow of microloans in India, Egypt, and Indonesia in June 1999.
February 9, 2005 Scot Medbury, director, San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. Opened in 1879, the wood and glass greenhouse is the oldest existing conservatory in the Western Hemisphere and has attracted millions of visitors to Golden Gate Park since it first opened its doors. It is designated as a city, state and national historic landmark and was one of the 100 most endangered sites of the World Monuments Fund. It is a civil engineering landmark as well, serving as one of the few examples of a Victorian-era prefabricated building. The Conservatory was closed in 1995 and reopened in 2003 after extensive repairs and reconstruction. With a new $4 million program of horticultural exhibits and floral displays, the Conservatory joins a distinctive circle of modern American horticultural museums that are on the cutting edge of botanical interpretation and conservation education. In this spectacular museum of living plants, immersive displays in five galleries engage visitors physically, intellectually and emotionally. These splendid displays not only delight, but deliver a moving message about the rapid changes in tropical habitats worldwide and efforts currently underway to conserve these special places.
  Scot Medbury has been involved in the curation, cultivation and interpretation of botanical collections for twenty-five years, having held challenging appointments at botanical gardens in California, the Pacific Northwest, Great Britain, New Zealand and Hawaii. His broad knowledge of the horticultural, ecological and design characteristics of temperate, subtropical and tropical plants has helped to inform the master-planning of botanical gardens throughout the West, where a vast native and cultivated flora, diverse gardening climates and complex land-use history challenge designers to create ecologically appropriate and regionally sensitive landscapes. In 2004, he received the professional citation from the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta for his contributions to public gardens in North America. At both the Conservatory of Flowers and the Strybing Arboretum, where he has been director since 1999, his priorities have been to optimize the use, enjoyment and understanding of these facilities by all San Franciscans, and to bring additional support for maintenance and curation. “Our challenge here is to respect what we already have,” he says, “while continuing to enhance the diversity of both the plant collections and the audiences who come here to learn about them.”   He shared the story of the Conservatory’s restoration, and an update on the San Francisco Botanical Garden (formerly Strybing Arboretum).
February 16, 2005 Greg Molloy, past district governor, Rotary District 5150, speaking about, among other things, his experience on a Rotaplast mission.
February 23, 2005 Michael Silver, motivational speaker, performing amazing magic and speaking on the Fish Philosophy, which was inspired by the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle. Silver’s past clients include Motorola, Birkenstock, Agilent, FATC, and the mayor of San Francisco.
March 2, 2005 Frank Falzon, retired decorated inspector, SFPD Homicide Detail. He was the lead investigator in the Zodiac case (1969), Juan Corona (one of the first noted serial killers, 1970), the Zebra murders (1973–74), the City Hall murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk (1978), and the Night Stalker Case (Richard Ramirez, 1985). He is president-elect of the Rotary Club of Novato. His talk is titled “The lighter side of homicide, the funny things that happen on the way to a murder.” He was joined by his sidekick, Dean Heffelfinger, past president of the Rotary Club of Novato.
March 9, 2005 Robert Cormack, principal (chair), Academic Council, University of the Highlands and the Islands, Scotland. Mr. Cormack was a guest at our meeting and gave a talk in lieu of our featured speaker, who did not show up.
March 16, 2005 Dennis Zinner, Doctor of Chiropractic and member, Rotary Club of San Francisco West. Dr. Zinner’s talk, “To your Health,” discussed basic principles of chiropractic and simple health programs that a person can do on a daily basis to keep healthy.
March 23, 2005 Bronwyn Eisenberg, Director of Artistic Learning, California Shakespeare Theater. Founded in 1974, the Theater began as an artistic collective and has evolved into a fully professional theater known for its innovative productions of classic theater. During its 15 years at Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park, there were over 50 productions, primarily of the plays of William Shakespeare. In 1991, the Theater built its current performance venue, the 545-seat Bruns Memorial Amphitheater in the hills between Berkeley and Orinda.
  Currently beginning her eighth season with the Theater, Bronwyn Eisenberg has worked as a freelance dramaturg and director in both New York City and the Bay Area. At Cal Shakes, she serves as dramaturg on the season’s productions and as Director of Cal Shakes’ Audience Enrichment programs. She has also worked as dramaturg at other regional theaters in Northern California, including A.C.T., TheatreWorks, and the Marin Theatre Company, where she was dramaturg for the professional premiere of a previously unproduced Tennessee Williams play, “Spring Storm.”
March 30, 2005 Lisa Wiklund, Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar from Sweden. The talk is titled “From north Sweden to San Francisco.” Lisa is enrolled at San Francisco State University in the women’s studies program. Her first international experience came was in 1992, when she lived in Germany for a year as an foreign exchange student with the exchange organisation Youth For Understanding (YFU) at the age of 17. She came to the Bay Area in 1994 and 1995 to intern in the regional office of YFU down in Los Altos. Back in Sweden she is a senior at the University of Umeå, majoring in social work, and third year medical student. Her dream is to combine her work as a doctor with women’s issues in the social field in San Francisco.
April 6, 2005 Kashimura Mayu and Risa Aoki, Rotary ambassadorial scholars from Japan. (Note: their first names are Mayu and Risa.) Both scholars are pursuing master’s degrees in TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) at San Francisco State University. Mayu’s sponsor district is Rotary District 2570, which is in Saitama prefecture, very close to Tokyo. She earned her master’s degree in English literature at Tsuda college and continued to study English literature, especially Victorian novels, and taught English at a junior high and high school in Tokyo. Risa was born in Yamagata, in the countryside in the northern part of the main island of Japan. Studying in Japan, she got her Bachelor’s degree in French culture, and lived in France for a year. Then she worked for a wine trading company and Citibank for three and half years.
April 13, 2005 Robert Bowcock, retired butcher and author, Butchertown, A Collage of a San Francisco Institution During 1950–1969. Butchertown referred to several neighborhoods, the most important of which was near Islais Creek, south of the former Army Street, an area of slaughterhouses, canneries, saddle shops and meat processing plants. A San Francisco native, Robert Bowcock was born in 1917 and attended Poly High School and graduated with a B.S. degree in animal husbandry from U.C. Davis in 1939. The son of a European butcher, he got his start in the butcher business watching and working with his father in the family business. He later cut his teeth in the trade while working in the beef cutting romos of the famed H. Moffat & Company from 1939 to 1941 in San Francisco’s Butchertown before joining the Army Air Corps in 1941, serving as a navigator on the B-17 Flying Fortress over Europe during WWII. After the war he returned to San Francisco to help his father and brother in the butcher business before starting and running his own butcher shop and deli, Bowcock’s Market, on Irving Street for nearly four decades before retiring in 1977.
  Mr. Bowcock was joined by architect Karen Kwong, who assisted in the preparation of the book and did the front cover art, design, and typesetting.
April 27, 2004 Svetlana (Lana) Kim, financial consultant and member, Rotary Club of San Francisco Golden Gate. Topic: The world Is Your Financial Oyster: (a) Bull and bear markets; (b) There is no return without risk; (c) Diversify; (d) Ask for help; (e) Invest in your future, invest in you!
May 4, 2005 Regina (Reggie) Silbert, Community Relations Director, AlmaVia of San Francisco, an assisted living/dementia care community. She has worked in the field of aging since 1995 and has a master’s in gerontology and healthcare administration. She has worked for the American Society on Aging, the Goldman Institute on Aging, and was the executive director of a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon, that provides support services for older adults who are visually impaired and blind. Her specialty is program development for individuals with dementia. The talk is titled “Eldercare: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
May 11, 2005 Debbie Schachner, hiker, fundraiser, volunteer. Hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine in 2000 gave her many opportunities to see people’s inherent goodness. From January to October 2003, she volunteered in Timau, Kenya, teaching students who never before had the opportunity for an education. She decided to serve in Kenya with Christian Foundation for Children and Aging (CFCA), knowing there was something she would learn only overseas. Witnessing the Kenyans’ daily struggle to survive and few opportunities to access their dreams motivated her to encourage people to do more to help others.
  Debbie plans to hike across the United States over the next two years. One of the purposes will be to encourage people to search inside themselves to find their talents and passions, then to take action by applying those gifts to the needs in the community. She will also be raising funds to build a public library in Timau, where she will return as a volunteer with the Action for Water and Education (AWE) Foundation. Her Walking With Faith website tells the ongoing story of her journey.
May 18, 2005 Pablo Castro, member, Rotary Club of Mission San Rafael, and owner, Marin Hardwood Floors, welcoming guests interested in learning more about the fun, excitement, and rewards of being a Rotarian.
May 25, 2005 Kelly Quirke, executive director, Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF), a nonprofit organization committed to the belief that trees are a critical element of a livable urban environment. Since 1981, FUF has offered financial, technical, and practical assistance to individuals and neighborhood groups who want to plant and care for trees.
June 1, 2005 Nancy DeStefanis, founder and executive director, San Francisco Nature Education, which provides environmental education programs for youth and adults throughout San Francisco. Programs include monthly Birding for Children walks, Heron Watch at Stow Lake, and an annual Bird Calling Contest for fourth graders.
  DeStefanis discovered the first documented nesting of great blue herons in the city of San Francisco in 1993 and monitors the colony for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. She lectures on natural history and wildlife throughout the Bay Area, including the Strybing Arboretum, Randall Science Museum, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco Public Library and Oakland Museum. She is the narrator of the video “Heron Island” (1998-IDG films) directed by Emmy award winner Judy Irving and is the co-author of the song (with Sharon Walters) “My Blue Herons” which she performed for us. She has taught Adult and Junior Academy classes at the California Academy of Sciences and Audubon Canyon Ranch. DeStefanis is an attorney, non-profit director and community organizer. The talk is titled Great Blue Herons of Golden Gate Park.
June 8, 2005 Tony Kozlowski, executive director, Seva Foundation. Seva, based in Berkeley, builds partnerships to respond to locally-defined problems with culturally sustainable solutions, with three major programs: 1. Sight restoration and blindness prevention in India, Nepal, Tibet, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Tanzania; 2. Community self-development for the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala and Chiapas; 3. Diabetes prevention and small grants program for Native Americans across the U.S.
  Tony Kozlowski has spent his entire career in international humanitarian and development work, most of it overseas. A native of Bridgeport, Conn., he received a B.A. at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., a certificate of political studies at the University of Paris’ Institute of Political Studies, and an M.A. in international relations from the University of Maryland in College Park. After teaching high school French and U.S. history at Severn School in Maryland, he began his international career with the Ford Foundation in Tunis, Tunisia supporting colleagues in the fields of agricultural development, family planning and public administration He then worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees starting at their headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and then for a number of years in Africa including the countries of Senegal, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, and Sudan. Following his work with the UN, he became executive director of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies in Geneva, which promotes cooperation among international organizations involved in humanitarian and development assistance. In the 1990s, Tony came back to the U.S., where he became president of the American Refugee Committee based in Minneapolis, Minn., and built that humanitarian organization from a $3 million annual budget to an almost $30 million over 10 years. The lure of Europe, where he and his family spent over 18 years, brought Tony back to Switzerland, where he was executive director of the FXB Foundation, which dealt with HIV-AIDS, particularly AIDS orphans. Since January 2004, Tony has been executive director of the Seva Foundation. He credits his wife Pam, since his career began, as his primary life-support system.
June 15, 2005 Pamela Hawley, founder and president, Giving Global, which supports internationally-focused NGOs through philanthropy and time, by connecting volunteers and donors with its NGO partners. GivingGlobal’s service is unique; it has a Quality Affiliation Model, a no-cut policy on donations, and a service that targets both volunteers and donors. Services include a customized version for corporations and their community involvement programs, a service which in turn contributes to GivingGlobal’s sustainability.
  Pamela Hawley was a co-founder of VolunteerMatch in 1996, a nonprofit which has matched more than two million volunteers with nonprofits through its web-based marketplace. Her international experience includes work and volunteering abroad in the areas of microfinance in remote villages of India; crisis relief work in the 2000 El Salvador earthquake; digital divide training in the Killing Fields of Cambodia; and sustainable farming in the countryside of Guatemala. The talk is titled “Social Entrepreneurship.”

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