The Rotary Club of Westlake Bay Village held its weekly Wednesday meeting on August 21, 2024.
 
The meeting was a hybrid with 22 participants meeting via zoom and in person. President Mangels called the meeting to order at 7:30 a.m. and began with a prayer followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and the Rotary Four-Way Test.
 
Andrew welcomed everyone to the meeting and introduced our guests, George Hwang, President of the Lakewood-Rocky River noon club, Gary Taylor, and our speakers, Bob Paponetti and Laurie Atkins-Holliday from the Literary Cooperative.
 
Club news:
 
Pints and Pours for Polio will return August 22nd at Sibling Revelry. This is a District event and is a great opportunity to enjoy a cold beer with fellow Rotarians.
 
The Art Festival committee met last week. They will be redoing the sponsorship packages for next year’s event in order to gain more sponsors.
 
Rotary will be sponsoring a service project to help clean Lake Erie. Anyone interested and available can meet at Huntington Beach on September 18th. More information to follow.
 
Our speakers today were Bob Paponetti and Laurie Atkins-Holliday from the Literacy Cooperative. Bob recently spoke to us about childhood literacy, but today came to talk about adult literacy. Child literacy problems are a direct result of adult literacy problems in the home. 54% of adults in Cuyahoga County suffer from some degree of illiteracy. 64% suffer from numeracy deficiencies. The US ranks 16th in literacy and 30th in technology among the world’s countries, so it really is a problem.
 
To learn more, visit their website at literacycooperative.org.
 
 
We had time for our happy thoughts and the meeting adjourned at 8:28