The Bedford Club’s very first meeting of the Interact Club of Bedford TV took place this past December 20th.Now in grade 11 and a recent graduate of Christine Pinney’s RYLA program, Swetha Kaundinya, inspired to become a leader, set to work with the goal to establish an interact club in Bedford for middle school students. By integrating a junior Interact club concept, Bedford TV became the ideal setting for such an organization to prevail.
Under the leadership of Swetha, assisted by her assistant director Sachi Regmi, both of them BHS Interact Club members, that meeting of ten students: two in grade 8, four in grade 7, two in 5 and two in grade 4 went amazingly well. Lots of creative ideas suggested. The first goal for Swetha was to find 5 students who would be interested in starting an Interact club. With promotional information and sharing with students at Bedford TV, starting off with 10 students became an important first step.
Part of building leadership skills is to enable even younger students to have ownership of their own achievements. The mentoring program at RYLA is similar to the mentoring system of Bedford TV. Together with the resources of Bedford TV and Interact, all their goals fit nicely within vision of Rotary’s mission which is to promote leadership skills among young people.
At that meeting and following introductions, and distributing Interact club pins to new members the first order of business was for the club to honor Healy Weisman now in grade 12 who had just achieved 500 hours of community service to Bedford TV. Healy began her volunteer work with the TV Studio as a third grader.
Getting back to the challenge of the club, several ideas were consider, suggested and shared including:
• School and Education Support: that could include a focus to promote and encourage learning or improving second languages, especially since there is a growing student population speak multiple languages.
• Promote a focus on writing, skill development, and communication: such as writing news item for the Bedford Citizen and scripts for Bedford TV including the TV News.
• Build a focus on science: to include support and focus on environmental concerns, promoting Destination Imagination,local environment awareness, such as trash cleanup around Bedford.
• Promoting the arts, music, and sports in Bedford, and possibly expand to include archery, and cricket.
• Take on special projects perhaps with a focus helping others both locally and internationally such as making (crochet/knit) hats for NICU babies. Knitting or crocheting hats to keep children warm in Nepal, even in Bedford. Help raise money to sponsor and support kids worldwide and help raise money to help support refugees.
• Organizational planning for future meetings will include electing the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer and special project leaders to be determined. Community service credit will be provided for meetings and individually when students work on projects in town and at home.
• Related to Rotary the plan is to promote RYLA, Rotary’s 4 Way Test, and and other service and learning opportunities
The next meeting Wednesday January 10, 2024 1:45-2:30 pm. At 2:30, this meeting will be followed by the Bedford TV Video Production Class for students in grades 3-8. We all look forward to a symbiotic relationship between the Interact Club of Bedford TV and the Bedford TV Studio, both having unique resources all worth sharing with each other.