Dryden Rotary perseveres through pandemic, seeks new members

For over a decade, the Dryden Rotary Club has played an important role in the Dryden community, doing everything from cleaning up Main Street to renovating the Dryden Community Center Cafe. With the pandemic, the Rotary Club had to cancel many of its usual events and projects, but the club’s dedication to the community has never wavered.

The Dryden Rotary Club has always been a rather small club from its beginning in 2006, with membership consistently around 20, according to charter member Evan Kurtz. But its members are passionate about the Rotary, with almost everyone contributing to every project and event that the Rotary has.

“Within Dryden, there was no Rotary,” Kurtz said. “We established ourselves quickly. … We’ve always had between 18 and 22 members. And pretty much, year after year, [we’re] just steadily doing some of the same things.”

In a typical year, Rotary projects include a few annual projects and a few one-offs. Regular projects include cleaning North Street, assisting the local food pantry and participating in the USA Dictionary Project and Youth Exchange. Fortunately, the club has been able to keep up with its food pantry and cleanup work and some other projects, but COVID-19 has affected much of what the Rotary can do.

At the start of the coronavirus, the first hit to the Rotary was the loss of its usual meeting place — Dryden Community Center Cafe — when it had to shut down.

“For us, as a Rotary club, that was a little bit of a big bump in the road,” Kurtz said. “And we were just starting up. We made agreements and were settling into meeting at Tompkins Cortland Community College, and I think we met there twice, and then, they shut down. So, we had to switch over to Zoom meetings, which has been interesting and challenging for all sorts of groups all over the world.”

Other losses include the Youth Exchange Program and the Rotary Youth Leadership Project. The cancelation of the Youth Exchange Program was especially difficult for members, as President David Traver explained.

“Every year, we always get involved with the Rotary Youth Exchange, either send a student out to another country or we have students come in from another,” he said. “But the pandemic shut us down on that. … And my wife and I have hosted that. It’s a lot of fun hosting the young students from different countries. It’s quite a good experience.”

One educational project was able to continue, though — the Dictionary Project, which provides dictionaries to local students.

“We did do our dictionaries for the local schools, but we weren’t able to meet the kids,” Traver said. “We had to leave them in boxes. That’s a shame because Rotarians, we get to go to schools, hand them out to the kids, and it’s a neat experience. But that was not able to happen this year.”

Many of the Rotary’s usual fundraising events also had to be canceled, which is not optimal but also not crippling, Kurtz explained.

“Fundraising suddenly becomes different,” Kurtz said. “We found we’re doing OK, and one of our major expenses is hosting a student from overseas, and we’re not going to get one in August. … So, we’ll live on some savings. And we don’t have the expenses either, so I think we’re just going to kind of, like everybody, play it by ear.”

The coronavirus has also created new work for the Rotary. The community support group Mutual Aid Tompkins was founded to fill coronavirus needs, and one large effort was to put together food pantry “pods” throughout the county. The Dryden Rotary worked together with Mutual Aid to get several pods in the community.

“There were going to be seven in Dryden, so we were able to give them $550 towards materials for the many pantries, which allowed people who didn’t have transportation or didn’t want to go to the larger food pantries to be able to get some critical food supplies within walking distance to their homes,” Kurtz said.

Reopening has helped to bring back some of the Rotary’s events, with a community drop-off for Finger Lakes ReUse planned for Sept. 12 and a barbecue planned for Sept. 19.

The Rotary and the rest of the Dryden has managed to persevere through the pandemic, though Traver expressed that the pandemic has shaken many, leaving him and others to wonder what lies ahead.

“My biggest concern is, what is normal?” Traver said. “I’m just concerned what’s going to happen to our small village of Dryden if we don’t get back to, what I call, normal. And I look at my membership, would they keep going if we don’t get back to normal? Would people just say they’ve had enough and they’re not going to do anything?”

For now, the club, like many others, is navigating the new normal, and its members are finding ways to get creative to continue serving the community.

“It’s kind of a mix of just finding our way in a slightly new terrain,” Kurtz said. “Some things will continue. Some won’t. And we’ll find other ways to help the community and to raise money to help the community.”

Those interested in helping the Rotary are encouraged to reach out to the club, and Kurtz and Traver shared a call for additional mentors.

“We’d love to be able to grow the club more,” Kurtz said. “Rotary is the largest and oldest service organization in the world. We’ve been around a long time. We have no restrictions on membership except that you’re 18 and a person of good character, ready to help.”