solar energy expands access to health care

 

Solar energy expands access to health care

By Etelka Lehoczky

In 2021, the Rotary Club of Accra-Spintex installed a new solar power system at the Alokpatsa Community-Based Health Planning and Services compound in eastern Ghana. For years, many babies had been born there by the light of candles and cellphone flashlights because of unreliable power.

A lot of babies are born at the Alokpatsa Community-Based Health Planning and Services compound, a health center in eastern Ghana. And for years, a lot of those babies were born in the dark.

“We didn’t have any power. What we had were lamps and candles,” says Nelson Addy, a former facility team leader at the center in the Oti region. “When the woman delivering had a tear and we wanted to suture, we found it very difficult. We had to strain our eyes with our phone [flashlights] to do the suturing.”

That changed when the Rotary Club of Accra-Spintex, of the Greater Accra region of Ghana, installed a new solar power system at the center. The project included a complete rewiring and, crucially, plenty of lights

Courtesy of Nortse Amarteifio

In 2021, the Rotary Club of Accra-Spintex installed a new solar power system at the Alokpatsa Community-Based Health Planning and Services compound in eastern Ghana. For years, many babies had been born there by the light of candles and cellphone flashlights because of unreliable power.

In 2021, the Rotary Club of Accra-Spintex installed a new solar power system at the Alokpatsa Community-Based Health Planning and Services compound in eastern Ghana. For years, many babies had been born there by the light of candles and cellphone flashlights because of unreliable power.

“In the surgical ward, we made sure there would be no need for them to use [phone] lights,” says Nortse Amarteifio, the president of the Accra-Spintex club, whose solar company donated labor and some materials for the $21,000 installation. “We also put in solar streetlights all around the compound and on the street in front of the hospital.”

One of the first mothers to give birth after the installation was so delighted with the upgrades, Addy says, she used “Solar” as the name for one of her children. “It felt like it was all planned by nature for the child to see the first light installed in Alokpatsa,” he says.

Solar solutions

Solar energy previously had powered the Alokpatsa health center, but that system was no longer working. Clinic staff members were excited for the return of a solar system. The Alokpatsa installation is one of numerous Rotary projects using solar power to improve access to health care around the world. In the past dozen years, Rotary clubs have installed solar power systems in health centers in Nepal, Haiti, Pakistan, Mexico, Armenia, India, and many African countries — and there’s much more to do. An estimated 1 billion people in lower-income countries are served by health facilities that lack reliable electricity or have no electricity at all, according to a 2023 report by the World Health Organization. In sub-Saharan Africa, only half of hospitals have reliable electricity. Extreme weather, often connected to climate change, is exacerbating the problem, increasing energy costs and damaging power grids.

“Off-grid health facilities need to have access to clean, reliable energy solutions,” says Luciana Mermet, who works for the United Nations Development Programme as the manager of the Global Fund Partnership and Health Systems Team, HIV and Health Group. “And we’re not talking only about solutions in rural areas. Urban areas can also have unreliable power grids. If you don’t have affordable and sustained energy access, you will have situations where you’re delivering [babies] in candlelight or where you’re unable to refrigerate the health commodities you need to provide care.”

Rotary members in Uganda, including (from left) Joseph Ssuuna, Joseph Ssengooba, and Charlotte Atukunda, led a solar project at a rural health center.

Courtesy of Annie NinyesigaWomen giving birth in rural areas are among the most affected by such inadequacies, according to the WHO report. It was this problem that galvanized Annie Ninyesiga, president of the Rotary Club of Bwebajja, Uganda, to get a solar system installed at a rural health center in her country. Her club secured a Rotary Foundation global grant in partnership with the Rotary Club of Aarau, Switzerland, to pay for the $76,000 maternal and child health project, which also provided medical equipment, an ambulance, and training for health workers, village health team members, and traditional birth attendants.

“This center serves a very big population in hard-to-reach areas,” Ninyesiga says. “We thought it was important that the people have access to, at least, the basic maternal and child health support.” She adds that solar is superior to the area’s hydroelectric power grid. “The hydroelectric power is not reliable. It’s on and off,” she says. “Sometimes it can’t even charge a mobile phone. Sometimes it provides light but can’t run any equipment.”

Not only do solar panels keep lights shining and equipment functioning, they reduce electrical bills and cut down on the need for generators fueled by expensive — and climate-unfriendly — gasoline. Health facilities then have more funds for patient care. By installing a solar power system at Hospital Bienfaisance in Pignon, Haiti, a Rotary project significantly lowered the hospital’s $4,000 monthly gasoline costs.

Even in areas where there are few or no health centers, solar power can bring health care to people in a very literal way. A few solar panels can enable a doctor to convert a van or trailer into a mobile clinic to serve remote areas.

Revolutionizing vaccine storage

Solar power is also revolutionizing vaccine storage. Many vaccines must be stored at temperatures of 36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 8 degrees Celsius). The oral polio vaccine can be stored at this temperature for six months. In areas with limited or no electricity, or frequent power outages, vaccine refrigerators are often powered by kerosene. They can work only if there’s fuel available, so there may be periods when no vaccines can be stored. Also, this type of refrigerator often provides uneven cooling, spoiling the vaccines inside.

“Sometimes the fridge might not be functioning perfectly — the control is erratic,” says Souleymane Kone, team lead for WHO’s Essential Programme on Immunization. “During the night the temperature might drop down to -1 Celsius [30 Fahrenheit] sometimes, and in the daytime it will go up, exposing the vaccine to excessive heat.”

In 2015 Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, one of Rotary’s partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, found that up to 90 percent of health facilities in some countries were equipped with old, obsolete, or broken refrigerators. Since then, Gavi, UNICEF (another GPEI partner), and other NGOs have focused on transitioning to solar direct drive refrigerators. First introduced in 2010, these refrigerators are powered directly by the sun without using batteries. The solar energy freezes water or another freezable substance to make an “ice bank” inside the unit that maintains the right temperature after the sun goes down. Costing around $4,000, a fridge can keep vaccines cold for three days or more without the sun shining.

“It is critical for us, especially when looking at increasing the coverage of routine immunizations, that we have a sufficient cold chain storage capacity at all different levels, including the remote areas, including places where there are frequent power fluctuations,” says Anahitta Shirzad, a health specialist with UNICEF’s Immunization Supply Chain program.

“The solar direct drive refrigerators come in very, very handy,” Shirzad says. “They have supported [our goal of] reaching the unreached. We’re looking at the last mile.”

Solar direct drive technology works best with motors such as those used in fans or pumps, while many installations that power whole buildings use solar batteries to store excess energy. At Alokpatsa, the Rotary club solar installation makes it possible to operate a water pump, a sterilizer, and a refrigerator that stores vaccines for two other facilities in the area. It also powers a humbler, but still welcome, piece of equipment: an iron.

“When the lights came, I was able to iron my uniform,” Addy says. “Everyone in the community would now see me as a professional. I felt so happy. I don’t even know how to express this happiness.”

This story originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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Media literacy is crucial for healthy societies. Rotary members are teaching people to think critically about what they see and read

 

Media literacy is crucial for healthy societies. Rotary members are teaching people to think critically about what they see and read

By Etelka Lehoczky

The first day at a new school can be disorienting for any teenager. But your first day at Virginia Hall High School is even stranger than most. Your grandfather claims he used to be a spy, your sister accuses some students of locking her in a closet, and everyone says a monster is stalking the hallways.

What is happening? Is any of this true? Instead of rushing off to fight the monster, you read about the weird recent events in the school newspaper. You ask yourself: Do these sources provide multiple pieces of evidence for their claims? Could they possibly be earning money because of what they’re saying? Do their stories cast a negative light on people who disagree with them?

You ask all these questions because you’re actually playing a video game designed to increase your media literacy. Co-created by Anahita Dalmia, a member of the Rotary Club of Newport Beach, California, USA, the game Agents of Influence is being developed to help 11- to 13-year-olds think critically about what they see on social media and in the news.

“We’re teaching kids to understand media bias, logical fallacies, and confirmation bias. We teach things like reading closely — tools you can use to determine what to trust online,” says Dalmia, the founder and CEO of game developer Alterea Inc.

Experts interviewed for this story recommended several nonpartisan fact-checking sites. Here are a few:

• PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning site run by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists
• Full Fact, a London, England-based factchecking site
• Snopes, a source of information on urban legends and online rumors since 1994
• FactCheck.org, a nonprofit project of the Annenberg Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, USA

• Dalmia, a third-generation Rotarian, says the game’s approach was inspired partly by Rotary’s Four-Way Test.

  “The first question is, ‘Is it the truth?’ And there’s a reason that’s the first question,” Dalmia says. “If it’s not the truth, you cannot make a strong judgment call based on any of the other questions, because you’re starting on an unstable foundation.”

  “An unstable foundation” is one way to describe the current state of the media landscape. Experts say we’re exposed to far more media than ever before. That includes both misinformation (unintentional untruths) and disinformation (deliberate falsehoods meant to mislead people). Although many outlets are responsible and credible, figuring out what to believe can take time and effort.

  “Before the internet, if I went to get a newspaper, it was run by journalists for whom truth was an important standard. Of course newspapers were biased. But today, people who want to believe things just post stuff,” says Alan Dennis, a professor of internet systems at Indiana University.

  “There are active disinformation campaigns by foreign governments designed to influence voters in democratic countries. The actors have become much more sophisticated, and they have learned quite a bit about what messaging works.”

  People are aware of this problem, and they say they want to become savvier about the media they consume. A study released this year found that about seven in 10 Americans were interested in learning how to better distinguish between true and false information online. But media literacy is more than just separating fact from fiction.

  “We need to be able to judge things like, ‘What’s the bias behind it? Who created it? Who’s benefiting from it?’ So there’s not a simple fix here,” says Jeff Share, a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-author of “The Critical Media Literacy Guide.” “We need to slow down and investigate. It might mean it’s going to take me a couple more minutes, but I can go to some different sources. I can also recognize that some are more legitimate than others.”

• Training storytellers

  Many people believe that ideological biases and financial interests guide major news outlets’ coverage, says global grant scholar Alex Freeman, who is pursuing a master’s degree in global media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

  “It’s one of the big reasons that people have turned against media, but I think it’s an overcorrection,” Freeman says. “A lot of people have turned to independent journalists who are more willing to incorporate their own personal experience into their reporting. But without a traditional media apparatus — without standard practices for ensuring accuracy — it’s hard to know who’s trustworthy.”

  Still, independent voices can be crucial in places where media organizations lack funding or are restricted by repressive governments. When Rotary Peace Fellow Thomas Sithole realized his hometown in Zimbabwe was ignored by major media outlets, he launched a community radio station. Then he founded the Zimbabwe Centre for Media and Information Literacy to teach people to think more critically and tell their own stories effectively. He believes the two skills are intertwined.

  “We tell citizens how to arm themselves against disinformation and misinformation,” he says. The Centre also trains citizen journalists and other content creators, teaching skills like fact-checking and ensuring balance in a story.

  “We’re trying to build a movement across the region, because we see that there is no appetite from our governments to push for policies that support media and information literacy among citizens,” Sithole says.

  The threat of artificial intelligence

  Even as he trains an army of storytellers, Sithole worries that the arrival of artificial intelligence will make it easier to create and spread disinformation.

  “For unsuspecting citizens, it’s creating a lot of challenges,” he says. “It becomes very difficult now to tell whether a piece of content is true or false, especially if it’s in the form of videos or images. It’s something that is really a challenge even to the professional journalist.”

  Some believe the key is educating younger media consumers. Erin McNeill meets many students through her job as CEO of the U.S.-based nonprofit Media Literacy Now, and she’s heartened by what she finds. “AI is definitely making it harder to identify good and credible sources,” McNeill says. But she says people can use the same skills to analyze human-generated and AI-generated content.

  “Young people are so creative and smart. We’re educating them so they can rise to the challenge,” she says. “They’re going to find solutions as long as they’re given the skills and the education they need.”

  The same belief animates Dalmia as she continues to develop and promote Agents of Influence. She has presented the game to numerous Rotary clubs and hopes Rotarians will encourage their local schools to use it. “This started as a passion project, but there was a huge demand from parents who were concerned about how social media was shaping their kids’ perspectives and interactions with the outside world,” Dalmia says. “The resounding feedback we’ve gotten is, ‘Can I have this for my kid who thinks TikTok is a reliable source of information?’”

  Learn about Rotary’s work to support education and promote peace.

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A ‘barter baron’ with a knack for recruiting Rotary members

 

A ‘barter baron’ with a knack for recruiting Rotary members

By Dylan Foley

Image credit: Kate Warren

One day in the mid-1960s, a salesperson walked into Bernie Bregman’s paint manufacturing plant in Syracuse, New York, and urged him to join Barter Mart, a company that facilitated barter exchanges. With a one-time sign-up fee, participants, who could be individuals or companies, could exchange goods and services, with the company earning a commission on each transaction. Bregman loved the idea and soon became a member. Once, he managed to persuade a candle-maker to sign up. They ended up bartering for advertising.

“People barter all the time — with their lawyers, their accountants,” says Bregman, a 52-year member of the Rotary Club of Eastwood (Syracuse). In later years, he became the marketing director for the Syracuse Trading Exchange, another barter company that allowed members to also trade for credits toward goods and services. He eventually ran the company and part of his pay was in trading credits. “I stayed in Las Vegas with my family on my barter credits,” he says. “I’ve gotten a hot tub and works of art from trading credits.”

A local magazine gave him the nickname “barter baron” in 1983 when he was with the Trading Exchange. At 91, Bregman says bartering still gives him a high. He is now a member of a Wisconsin-based barter company. Each time he brings in a new member, he gets $100 in trade credits.

A gregarious man with the energy of a person 30 years younger, he also uses his formidable networking skills to help Rotary. For the past 12 years, Bregman has served as co-chair of his club’s membership committee. “Rotary International has a 50+ club for people who have recruited more than 50 members,” he says. “Over the last five decades, I’ve recruited more than 150.” One of his secrets is to monitor local media for promising candidates. “I’m not afraid to cold call people and invite them to our club meetings,” he says.

Three of the club’s four monthly meetings feature speakers, which can be a source for prospective Rotary members. “The speeches are everything,” says Bregman, who has been on a mission to bring diverse members to the club. “I reached out to the Syracuse chapter of 100 Black Men, a national leadership group. Their president gave a speech and I asked him to become a member. He joined, and pulled in his vice president. We now have 27 percent nonwhite membership.”

Another of Bregman’s notable recruits is entrepreneur Tai Ngo Shaw, who came to Buffalo in 1982 at the age of 10 as a Vietnamese refugee, and was adopted by a local family. Four decades later, Shaw is a prominent business owner and real estate investor, as well as a leader in Syracuse’s Vietnamese community. “I saw that Tai Ngo Shaw was speaking at the local NAACP chapter,” says Bregman. “I called Tai, a complete stranger, and asked him to speak at my Rotary club. It was a big success.” Shaw joined the Eastwood club in 2021.

When the club celebrated its 60th anniversary in November 2021, it had 28 members. Bregman and others in the club brought their membership promotion efforts into overdrive. “With the new members in January, we are up to about 70,” he says. For Bregman, pulling in a new Rotary member is like sales. “When I bring in somebody, it keeps me going,” he says.

Bregman studied journalism at Syracuse University, and after his Army service, he was a reporter for a Syracuse TV station. Laid off right before his wedding in 1957, he answered an ad for “an able-bodied man” and became a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman. It turned out that his charisma and outgoing personality made him very successful at sales. “I am a bit of character,” admits Bregman. “As a former journalist, I know how to make a story.”

Recently retired after spending 32 years as the marketing director for the Central New York Business Journal, Bregman stays active. He thinks of all his activities as part of his network. “I work out of the solarium in our house, making calls all day. My wife wants me to do projects around the house. I just shrug my shoulders,” he says sheepishly. On a recent Monday, Bregman made 50 phone calls to remind people of the next day’s meeting. “It is a way to connect, to see if people are sick or out of town,” he says.

Last spring when he brought in Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh to speak, Bregman experienced a first. “The president of the club suddenly announced that the mayor had declared March 28 to be Bernard B. Bregman Day. I received one of those proclamations,” Bregman said. “It was a nice thought.”

An abbreviated version of this story originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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https://www.rotary.org/en/barter-baron-knack-recruiting-rotary-members

A profitable path

 

A profitable path

With minority business awards, a Texas Rotary club lifts the fortunes of enterprises with heart, itself included

By Mary Beth Gahan Photography by Raul Rodriguez

Rosa Maria Berdeja, who found purpose as an immigration lawyer, became an enthusiastic member of the Rotary Club of Fort Worth after her firm was recognized by the club’s Minority Business Awards.

As a child, Rosa Maria Berdeja couldn’t imagine she would go to college, much less become a successful attorney. Growing up in the 1980s in the Texas border town of Brownsville, she was told by her mother that she could drop out of high school as soon as it was legally possible, as long as she got a job to help pay bills. That’s what her five older siblings did, and she assumed she would too. But when Berdeja was 14, her mother moved to Florida with her new husband, leaving the teen essentially homeless in Texas. School was the one place she knew she could get two free meals each day. Of the nine children in her family, she was the only one to earn a high school diploma. “It wasn’t that I wanted to get an education to better myself. I didn’t know that was possible,” Berdeja says. “The only reason I didn’t drop out was because we were poor.”

At 18, she moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, nearly 500 miles north, because she heard there were more job opportunities there. She started working as a receptionist in a small law firm and made extra money by convincing the attorney to let her take on the cleaning too. Over time, she was promoted to paralegal. “I was good at it,” she says. “The more I would do, the more I realized I could do.”

After she got a job at a bigger law firm that required paralegals to have a bachelor’s degree, she enrolled in college, attending classes on nights and weekends. Once she earned the degree, she figured that was the end of school for her. But one night while working late, an associate attorney needed her help to fill out a package shipping label. As inconsequential as the interaction might seem, it carried a life-changing revelation for Berdeja. “That’s when I knew I could be a lawyer,” she says with a smile. “I thought, ‘If you’ve gotten this far without learning how to ship a package, I’m going to excel.’”

While in law school at Texas Wesleyan University, Berdeja did pro bono work to help obtain visas for people who had been victims of violent crimes. “It was so touching to be able to take something horrible and get something positive out of it,” she says. “I realized this [immigration law] is where I could do the most good.”

More than a decade after passing the bar exam, Berdeja was doing just that, having established her own immigration law practice in Fort Worth. She helped people become U.S. citizens, advised them on how to get visas for family members, and provided legal aid to those facing deportation. Friends suggested she join Rotary to network with other business leaders, but she brushed them off, believing the weekly meetings would be too much of a commitment.

Then, in 2023, the Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber of Commerce nominated Berdeja’s firm for the Rotary Club of Fort Worth’s Minority Business Awards, a program that recognizes outstanding businesses in the community owned by minorities. To her surprise, her firm won second place. “It was a huge honor for a number of reasons,” Berdeja says. “A lot of times, lawyers are not seen as business owners, even though you have to know how to practice law and how to run a business.”

The honor came with a three-minute professional promotional video for her business and a complimentary one-year membership to the club. “When I won this free membership for a year, I thought, ‘Oh, yay, I get free lunch every Friday.’ Even now, I can afford to buy food, but I still have that mentality of: ‘Free meal? I’m not going to pass that up,’” Berdeja says.

Since then, she has found the club to be much more than a weekly meal.

Showing the value of Rotary

The Fort Worth Rotary Club was chartered in 1913. At an organizing meeting, a visiting Rotarian informed the attendees about the purpose of Rotary, then less than a decade old. “He told of its social advantages and said it was not an organization for the exchange of trade favors, but a club where business talks and experiences are to be told,” reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

By 1990, the Fort Worth club was one of the largest in the world, with more than 700 members. But from then on, as with many other service clubs in the U.S. during that time, membership declined. Three decades later, the number had dropped to around 200. “We knew we needed to do something to reverse this trend or eventually we could be extinct, irrelevant, or both,” says Carlo Capua, the club’s 2020-21 president.

The problem wasn’t a lack of potential members. At the same time the club was shrinking, the city was experiencing a population boom. Between 2010 and 2020, Fort Worth grew by 24 percent and topped 900,000 people.

Capua, now Fort Worth’s chief of strategy and innovation, began thinking about ways to show the value of Rotary to the broader community. He told Chris Jordan, who was on the club’s board at the time, that the club should be a place where people could discuss difficult and even controversial subjects. “He said, ‘We’re not relevant as a club. We need to have conversations that people aren’t eager to have,’” Jordan remembers.

In the summer of 2020, Capua set up a series called Courageous Conversations, which included panel discussions about politics, religion, and race — topics that Rotary clubs often avoid because of Rotary International’s status as a nonpartisan, secular organization. The idea was not to advocate for any particular views but to engage and inform people about issues important to them and to model respectful civic discourse at a time when that seemed to be in short supply.

The club invited speakers from local organizations and partnered with groups like the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens to help shape the conversations. One event brought together a rabbi, an imam, and a Baptist preacher — “kind of like the start of a joke,” Jordan quips — for a discussion about the place of organized religion in society.

“We really had some edgy conversations, but the one that got the most traction was on increasing business in the minority community,” Jordan says. That talk included former leaders of Fort Worth’s Black and Hispanic chambers of commerce and was moderated by Courtney Lewis, a bank executive who served the following year as the club’s first Black female president.

Capua and other members had become interested in the topic after studies showed that the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately hurt businesses with owners from minority groups. The Rotarians wanted to support those small business owners in Fort Worth and “quickly realized that none were members of our club,” he says. In fact, there were few people of color in the club at all. That year, when the police killing of George Floyd spurred nationwide protests and put a spotlight on race relations in the U.S., more than 90 percent of the club’s members were white, while less than half of Fort Worth residents were.

Around the same time, Jordan read a book that offered practical ways for Americans to respond to racial inequities, suggesting, for instance, that people break out of their social networks and get to know people of other races. It helped Jordan understand that businesses owned by minorities often lack access to networking to succeed at the level of businesses owned by white people. “Bingo. I got it at that point. Rotary offers relationships; that’s really what we’re about,” Jordan says. “My company won awards over the years, and it did a lot for market share and business.”

Awards benefit winners and the club

Jordan, who founded a company that designs and installs audio and video systems, approached the other board members with the idea of an award for businesses owned by people from minority groups that comes with an invitation to join the club. The plan was unanimously approved.

The club first presented the Minority Business Awards in 2021 and has annually since. Nominations are open to the public, with business owners allowed to enter themselves. The only requirements are that the business is within the Fort Worth city limits and qualifies as a minority business enterprise as defined by the National Minority Supplier Development Council. That means it must be at least 51 percent owned and operated by one or more individuals who are Asian, Black, Hispanic, or Native American.

To get the word out, members reach out to the area’s chambers of commerce for minority groups and secure local media coverage. Once the nominations come in, the club assigns a Rotarian advocate to each business. The advocates help the business owners through the application process and bring them to Rotary meetings to start connecting with members. Next, a committee uses a point system to winnow the nominated businesses to six ranked winners announced at an awards luncheon in April.

“The criteria for the award mirror Rotary’s Four-Way Test,” Jordan says. “We wanted a values-based award instead of sales, growth, or number of employees. We wanted to highlight minority-owned companies who had a heart for the community, demonstrating Service Above Self.”

Fort Worth club members (from left) Sameer Vaidya, Samantha Renz, Chris Jordan, and Carlo Capua review nominations for the 2025 awards.

The prizes have varied over the years. Now, the first-place winner gets a free one-year membership to the club, and the group covers Rotary dues for six months for the next four finalists. The owners of the top three businesses receive $15,000 scholarships toward an MBA from the University of Texas at Arlington, as well as professional marketing videos, which are shown during the luncheon. And the mayor of Fort Worth presents plaques.

Four years after the first awards were given out, the benefits for recipients are clear. When their free membership period is up, many of them decide to stay on as fully invested members of the club. They can see the positive results of networking with like-minded people, and some even pursue club leadership positions. “All the award winners, they got all that publicity within the club itself. Now they’re becoming part of the natural network that exists,” Jordan says. “Not only have winners stayed in the club, they’ve led committees.”

Building new bonds

Award winner Jeff Postell, whose business took fifth place in 2021, started in the construction industry when he dropped out of college at 19. He had enrolled at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, to study biology, but he says he spent more time hunting and fishing. Within a year, he was on academic probation.

His first construction job involved kneeling on ceramic tile and using a toothbrush-sized wire brush to scrub grout lines. Through the years, he worked his way up to supervisor and project manager roles and went back to college for degrees in construction engineering and business management.

Jeff Postell’s contracting company, Post L Group, was among the inaugural class of winners.

Now, he’s the owner of Post L Group, a contracting business in Fort Worth. He also runs a nonprofit, Building Pathways, that gives young people from disadvantaged communities opportunities in the construction industry and guides them through the start of their careers. “I think people are concerned about the bottom line and growth in their business, but not the growth of humans and these communities,” Postell says. “Construction is the quickest way for neighborhoods to flip themselves and for people to make money over the poverty line.”

When Postell’s company won the Minority Business Award and he started attending Rotary meetings, he realized the club’s mission aligned with his nonprofit’s purpose. “Rotary, to me, is one of the best organizations in Fort Worth,” Postell says. “I love our mission. It’s a breath of fresh air every Friday for me.”

After joining the club, Postell found common ground with a fellow Black member, Richard L. Knight, who was vice president of Knight Waste Services. The two men became fast friends, Postell says, often going on bike rides together. They bonded over their shared experience as fathers, and Knight introduced Postell to potential clients. “We had these great conversations. We both had big hearts for our communities and wanted to hire local people from neighborhoods so they could grow their capacity,” he says.

Knight was an ardent supporter of the awards program and for a time served as its chair. After he passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack in May 2024, the award was renamed the Richard L. Knight Minority Business Award.

That honor inspired Postell to step up. This year, he contributed $15,000 to become a presenting sponsor for the awards, which gave him a seat on the judging panel and a speaking slot at the luncheon. “God put it on my heart at that moment that I wanted to sponsor this first event after his death. I wanted to make sure I do things with him in mind. His name being tied to Rotary with this award is a big deal for me,” Postell says.

Paying it forward

In late January, Berdeja was at the historic Fort Worth ballroom where the club regularly gathers, eagerly waiting for a meeting to start. The club had taken a break over the holidays and then had to cancel a meeting because of a rare winter storm. “Friday is my favorite day of the week because I get to see all my friends,” she says. “I just can’t imagine not going every week.”

Katrina Rischer owns Carpenter’s Cafe & Catering, one of more than two dozen businesses that the club has honored since 2021.

Berdeja believes that the learning and networking opportunities that the club provides have made her a better leader and business owner, which, in turn, has led to more referrals for her law firm. She recently joined the program committee to find out how the club gets its top-tier speakers, like Mike Maddux, the pitching coach for the Texas Rangers, and Joseph Martin, a retired four-star general who served as the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff.

Having become a stronger leader, Berdeja is paying it forward, serving on the board of a foundation that supports the Young Women’s Leadership Academy of Fort Worth and promoting the value of education. “I never thought education was the key to my success,” she says. “Years later, I’m so glad I went to school because my life would have been so much different had I not.”

Less than two years after winning the award, Berdeja was the one standing at the podium to introduce a new member she’d proposed and helped through the process. And the crowd she spoke to looked different than it did a few years ago, when Jordan floated the idea of the Minority Business Awards. Back then, there were only 13 people of color in the club. Now there are 53. The club also reversed the decline in membership as a whole, and today it boasts about 250 members.

That’s thanks in no small part to Berdeja and the other award alumni who promote Rotary, bring guests to meetings, and persuade them to join. “Every Rotarian goes full Rotary. It becomes their identity,” Berdeja says. “Everyone’s like, ‘Here comes Rosie, inviting us to Rotary again.’”

This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.

A ‘barter baron’ with a knack for recruiting Rotary members

 

A ‘barter baron’ with a knack for recruiting Rotary members

By Dylan Foley

One day in the mid-1960s, a salesperson walked into Bernie Bregman’s paint manufacturing plant in Syracuse, New York, and urged him to join Barter Mart, a company that facilitated barter exchanges. With a one-time sign-up fee, participants, who could be individuals or companies, could exchange goods and services, with the company earning a commission on each transaction. Bregman loved the idea and soon became a member. Once, he managed to persuade a candle-maker to sign up. They ended up bartering for advertising.

“People barter all the time — with their lawyers, their accountants,” says Bregman, a 52-year member of the Rotary Club of Eastwood (Syracuse). In later years, he became the marketing director for the Syracuse Trading Exchange, another barter company that allowed members to also trade for credits toward goods and services. He eventually ran the company and part of his pay was in trading credits. “I stayed in Las Vegas with my family on my barter credits,” he says. “I’ve gotten a hot tub and works of art from trading credits.”

A local magazine gave him the nickname “barter baron” in 1983 when he was with the Trading Exchange. At 91, Bregman says bartering still gives him a high. He is now a member of a Wisconsin-based barter company. Each time he brings in a new member, he gets $100 in trade credits.

A gregarious man with the energy of a person 30 years younger, he also uses his formidable networking skills to help Rotary. For the past 12 years, Bregman has served as co-chair of his club’s membership committee. “Rotary International has a 50+ club for people who have recruited more than 50 members,” he says. “Over the last five decades, I’ve recruited more than 150.” One of his secrets is to monitor local media for promising candidates. “I’m not afraid to cold call people and invite them to our club meetings,” he says.

Three of the club’s four monthly meetings feature speakers, which can be a source for prospective Rotary members. “The speeches are everything,” says Bregman, who has been on a mission to bring diverse members to the club. “I reached out to the Syracuse chapter of 100 Black Men, a national leadership group. Their president gave a speech and I asked him to become a member. He joined, and pulled in his vice president. We now have 27 percent nonwhite membership.”

Another of Bregman’s notable recruits is entrepreneur Tai Ngo Shaw, who came to Buffalo in 1982 at the age of 10 as a Vietnamese refugee, and was adopted by a local family. Four decades later, Shaw is a prominent business owner and real estate investor, as well as a leader in Syracuse’s Vietnamese community. “I saw that Tai Ngo Shaw was speaking at the local NAACP chapter,” says Bregman. “I called Tai, a complete stranger, and asked him to speak at my Rotary club. It was a big success.” Shaw joined the Eastwood club in 2021.

When the club celebrated its 60th anniversary in November 2021, it had 28 members. Bregman and others in the club brought their membership promotion efforts into overdrive. “With the new members in January, we are up to about 70,” he says. For Bregman, pulling in a new Rotary member is like sales. “When I bring in somebody, it keeps me going,” he says.

Bregman studied journalism at Syracuse University, and after his Army service, he was a reporter for a Syracuse TV station. Laid off right before his wedding in 1957, he answered an ad for “an able-bodied man” and became a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman. It turned out that his charisma and outgoing personality made him very successful at sales. “I am a bit of character,” admits Bregman. “As a former journalist, I know how to make a story.”

Recently retired after spending 32 years as the marketing director for the Central New York Business Journal, Bregman stays active. He thinks of all his activities as part of his network. “I work out of the solarium in our house, making calls all day. My wife wants me to do projects around the house. I just shrug my shoulders,” he says sheepishly. On a recent Monday, Bregman made 50 phone calls to remind people of the next day’s meeting. “It is a way to connect, to see if people are sick or out of town,” he says.

Last spring when he brought in Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh to speak, Bregman experienced a first. “The president of the club suddenly announced that the mayor had declared March 28 to be Bernard B. Bregman Day. I received one of those proclamations,” Bregman said. “It was a nice thought.”

An abbreviated version of this story originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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