Todd Allen presents a longtime friend and Emmy Award winner, John Bowman, who will tell us how to write a joke.

 

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88229582283?pwd=aS9Hd3o1cS9ZK0hQL0ZhUHZXSEdxQT09

 

Meeting ID: 882 2958 2283

Password: 254494

 

The Zoom Room opens at 11:45 AM.  After the Pledge of Allegiance and opening Password Todd will introduce our speaker. 

 

They are recorded in “speaker view” which means if you do ask questions during the Q and A session you will appear on screen unless you disable the camera. 

 

 

At the outset of the meeting, Todd Allen miraculously handed a check for $30,326 to Kyle Fisher, LISTEN Executive Director--- the total amount our club raised as part of the Virtual Bell Ringing Campaign. Kyle explained to the club that even though we’ve experienced a relatively mild winter the requests for heating assistance have increased by 20%. Rotary’s donation will help to cover this uptick in demand for help in covering heating costs. 

 

After the speaker concluded, Todd Allen announced the club would be donating it’s COVID 19 fund to Willing Hands in the coming months and encouraged club members to click on the link to make a donation in lieu of meals. 

 

David Allen offered an indeterminate number of Happy Dollars associated with the good news that his son and daughter-in-law are moving to the Upper Valley. The recently created Happy Dollar Management Team (HDMT) will determine the size of the levy based on the number of job applications his son and daughter-in-law receive as a result of his announcement.

 

Jed Williamson offered a Happy Dollar in honor of David Allen’s haircut, which made him appear less like Alley Oop or David Crosby and more like a Rotary President in waiting. 

 

The Raffle Management Team (RMT) awarded TWO $10 in-kind donations: one for Dave Bradley for selecting the correct year of Rod Thomas’ birth; and one to Rod Thomas himself for turning 73 years old. 

 

 

REMINDER: Here’s the link to make your donation in lieu of paying for meals at Jesse’s AND the place to donate your Happy Dollars! As Todd announced at the meeting last week, the funds will be earmarked for Willing Hands. https://hanovernhrotary.ejoinme.org/COVID-19.

 

 

Len Cadwallader introduced David Hoffer, Lyme Timber’s CEO, who opened our eyes to a local business that is the largest private landowner in Michigan and Pennsylvania! David Hoffer reported that Lyme Timber owns 1.5 million acres of timberland across the country, with large landholdings in at least nine states. Lyme Timber’s primary focus is on developing sustainable forests on land that is conserved by States, local governments, or local non-profits. His firm creates local operating companies that manage these timberlands, earning a profit for his shareholders through the sale of timber, payments for easements, “cap and trade” compensation, and the resale of properties to other similar management firms. 

 

In addition to managing forestlands, Lyme Timber is engaged in “mitigation banking”, managing and/or restoring the wetlands that are protected by many state and local governments and introducing new wood harvesting technologies that preclude the need to build roads that often devastate the local ecosystems. 

 

In response to questions, David Hoffer suggested critics of Lyme Timber might object to the cutting of ANY trees and might also believe that impact investors are not doing as good a job as they could be in terms of managing forestlands. He hoped the Biden administration would make more funding for conservation easements possible but noted that land conservation seems to have bipartisan support and is baked into the federal budget. 

 

 

February 17 – Wayne Gersen introduces Alex Thurman, an archivist affiliated with Columbia whose been tracking web information on COVID for well over a year and also helped manage the collection of web data on the resistance movement during the Trump years. Oh… and he’s Wayne’s son-in-law. 

 

February 24 – Todd Allen will introduce Eric Benn who will tell us about how we are being spied on from space. After this week I will be able to insert a good joke here. 

 

March 3 – Todd Allen will introduce Tracy Hutchins from the Upper Valley Business Alliance who will give us some insights on how the pandemic is playing out in our region.

 

March 10 – Len Cadwallader introduces Jim Rubens whose talk, American Promise, will offer some ideas on how to take money out of politics.

 

March 17 – Dick Podolec will introduce Phil Hanlon, Dartmouth College President, who’s talk scheduled for election day was moved to this date. 
 

March 24 – Todd Allen introduces Christine Pederson who will tell us about the Easter Seals campaign in New Hampshire

 

March 31 – Todd Allen brings Noel Pauili, a Senior Scientist at Adimab to tell us about his firm’s efforts to “…turn good molecules into best in class molecules”.  

 

We’re now booked through mid-May but have open dates from May 19 forward…. Do YOU have any ideas for speakers to fill in the blanks moving forward? We’d love to hear them!

 

Wayne Gersen