This week, we’re joined by a couple of members of the Rotary Club of Elko! We have them with us today to share a bit about themselves as well as about the exciting and esteemed annual event they put on for our community. So, since we have many great things to cover today, I (Anthony Crosby) thought this would be a good time to discuss what exactly our local Rotary Club is. In short, Elko’s Rotarians are all about service! They’re committed to serving the community and engaging in special causes around the world, such as the eradication of the polio disease. These men and women do some great work, and AAT is thankful to have two of them joining us for a conversation!
Sitting down with us for this feature are Rotary Club members, Cheryl Paul and Anna Fluellen. They’re here to give us a little inside look into the club’s much-anticipated annual event, The Autumn Gala! This classy night is a fundraiser that will be held at the Elko Conference Center. Guests will enjoy a wonderful evening full of enjoyment, tasty food and drinks, and dancing to the music of a nine-piece jazz band from Boise, Idaho!
This sounds like a fantastic evening. Thank you for joining us to talk about it, ladies!
Now, Anna has been participating in Rotary events since her sophomore year of high school, as her grandmother was a polio survivor. She saw the impact the club had been making in people’s lives. Anna and her beautiful family have sat down to share their story with AAT before! If you would like to learn a little bit more about her, you can click here!
This, however, is Elko County Treasurer, Cheryl Paul’s, first time as an AAT guest. Therefore, before we learn more about the event, let’s get to know a bit about her story!
“My husband, Dan, and I got married in 1993. We met in Rock Springs, Wyoming. We moved here (Elko) because Dan’s family were “pioneers to Elko County.” However, when we moved here, there was nowhere to live in Elko, so we moved in with his grandparents. After about a month of walking down to Our Store to check the newspaper, which came out in the afternoon, to gauge what was available, we finally found a place!
“We both started working out at the mines, but when gold started dropping down to two hundred and fifty dollars an ounce, we realized we had too many of our eggs in one basket. I ended up coming into town to work for a trucking company. In 2002, I was offered a job at the courthouse and worked up through the ranks. This past January, I took office as the Elko County Treasurer!
“Shortly before he passed away, former Elko County Treasurer, Ceaser Salicchi, really felt that it was important that I get involved with Rotary. He had polio, and so Rotary was a big part of what we did. I started going, and as of this fall, I will have been a Rotarian for three years!”
Excellent, thank you, Cheryl! Now, can you please tell us more about the Gala? What is your goal for this fundraiser?
“Last year, we started our first fundraiser. The event went under a different name, but we raised just shy of ten thousand dollars! This year, we’re hoping to raise fifteen thousand dollars! We already have several sponsors buying tables, whether it be from local businesses or Rotarians themselves.”
Below is a complete list of all the things donations from the event will be going towards. We’ll let our readers look over it, and then, can you two elaborate on a couple of them?
Cheryl– “We give our physical dictionaries to every third grader in Elko County! We think this is important! My boys are twenty and twenty-four years old, and they still have their dictionaries from third grade!
“We send kids that could use a little extra help in the area of asserting themselves to camp for a week. This is our Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) camp. Normally, these camps cost between eight hundred and one thousand dollars to attend, but we help get them there!”
Anna– “One of the cool things about the PolioPlus program (listed) is that The Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation donates two dollars for every dollar through Rotary! This is a pretty big deal when it comes to those kinds of efforts. It’s the hope of a lot of Rotarians that polio will be eradicated within the next several years. Failure to do so, once and for all, in the last remaining areas could result in as many as two hundred thousand new cases every year, within ten years, all over the world!”
Wow, this genuinely sounds like a fun way to get people involved with some significant acts of service both locally and around the world! Thank you for sharing all of this with us, Anna and Cheryl!
If you would like to dust off your formal wear and purchase tickets for this event or donate a monetary gift, you can visit the Elko Rotary Club website at: https://squareup.com/store/rotary-club-of-elko/
You can stay caught up on everything going on around here at AAT by checking out our “Stay Connected” page! Make sure you never miss a feature!
See you around, Elko!
Article Credits:
Written by: Anthony Crosby
Edited by: Nadara Merrill
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