Pledge: President Bob
Prayer: President Bob
Song: Bill McL
Flim/Flam: Winner Peter Manley
Raffle: Winners, President Bob, Marty D, and visiting Rotarian George Meslow.
Visiting Rotarians: Rick Beck, Jupiter, FL, John Boucher, Avon, CT, and George Meslow, Central Citrus, FL
Happy bucks: Many and varied, lots of happy folks. John D gave Tres.pin to Paul M (Happy John)
Letters: President Bob read a thank you letter from Catherine O;Brien, recent Student of the Month.
HOPE PARTNERSHIP Presenter Tony Lyons, assisted by Randi Bradbury * Lisa LeMonte.
Several years ago a group met at St. Paul's; Lutheran Church to talk about affordable housing. The result of the meeting was the formation of Hope Partnership, with a mission to address the lack of affordable housing in Old Saybrook. United Way has provided grants to advance the work.
The lack of affordable rentals and for sale houses presents many problems including the difficulty of hiring and retaining town workers and volunteers, fire dept, etc.
Affordable housing is defined as 30% of income, or less, going for housing. The State of Connecticut has a goal of 10% of housing in a given town be affordable. Old Saybrook has less than 1% of housing as affordable. Tony stated that about 10% of the Motel units in Old Saybrook are \occupied by families.
Hope Partnership is working with Old Saybrook boards and commissions to address the problem, along with any and all interested parties. Hope is working with Northern Middlesex Habitat for Humanity to address single family dwellings.
Hope is presently working with the town of Old Saybrook to develop a site on Ferry Road to build affordable housing units.
Anyone interested on working with Hope Partnership, phone 388-9513 or on the web hopepartnershi-oldsaybrook,org.
