September 8, 2006

Kiwanis to start service club in Evergreen

Meeting set for Sept. 20

By Carol Rosen
Staff Writer

While Evergreen is currently one of a few areas in San Jose without a Kiwanis Club, that statement won’t be true for long.

San Jose Kiwanis Club member Dan Connolly, right, with NBC11’s John Farley, left, at the John Farley Turkey and Holiday Food Drive.

This month, Kiwanis officials will hold a meeting inviting Evergreen residents from ages 28 to 40 and above to join the club and begin providing service to the unique and diverse community that is Evergreen. The meeting is set for Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. at the new Evergreen Branch Library, 2635 Aborn Road, at the junction of Aborn and Kettmann.

“There is no Kiwanis Club in the Evergreen area,” said Dan Connolly, the current Lt. Gov. for District 12. “We would like to charter a new club with at least 40 members that would represent a microcosm of Evergreen’s cultural identity, or in other words, a good diversification of Evergreen’s population. Evergreen is a diverse economic area with a wide range of cultures.”

While there is a club in east San Jose, at White and Alum Rock, it’s addressing the needs of its particular community. The Evergreen area has expanded so much that area Kiwanians decided Evergreen should have its own club, said Connolly. “When I was in high school, there were few homes in the Silver Creek area and nothing past the Villages,” he said. “Now Evergreen School District is building new schools and taking on new students” to accommodate all the people, he said.

He added that besides a good mix of cultures, the new club should have a number of younger members to carry on when the older members retire.

His idea is to attract educators to Kiwanis. “We want to target educators,” he said. “We decided to have an evening meeting to appeal to educators who can’t attend morning or lunchtime meetings.”

Connolly, who has been active in Kiwanis since high school, added that there are 15 clubs in Division 12. The service group’s mandate, he said, is “that every dollar donated has to go back to the community it came from.”

Each club has its own list of services it supplies to its own particular area. For example, Kiwanis offers turn around scholarships to high school students that have turned their lives around whether by cleaning up their lives, getting out of a bad group or improving their grades. Each club provides scholarships for students from the area or from district high schools within the area so that they can attend college.

That method also allows the clubs to choose their own areas for support, donations and service. For example, Connolly belongs to the San Jose Kiwanis Club, which provides volunteers for Christmas in the Park, the San Jose Grand Prix and the John Farley Turkey and Holiday Food Drive. The club members also participate in Mervyn’s Back to School Day in which volunteers take children who can’t afford new items shopping and buy them new clothes, shoes and backpacks In addition, the group provides funding for turn-around scholarships, the Blind Babies Foundation and donations and meal preparation for InnVision.

Connolly was especially touched helping a five-year-old shop at Back to School Day. “I hate shopping,” he said, “but I agreed to help out, and I’m really glad I did. My student was 5-years-old. He’d never had a new pair of shoes. I had so much fun.”

Other clubs open tree lots at Christmas, or like the Cambrian Park club, have opened a summer music camp to provide students from age 7 through high school, the ability to learn and study music whether they can afford it or not. The tree lots provide funding for Christmas parties and presents and scholarships to the music camp.

Connolly’s own story and success can be attributed to Kiwanis, he said. He joined Andrew Hill High School’s Key Club in 1978. “I met Robert Jolley [a teacher at Andrew Hill] before I became a freshman. He got me involved in student government, and we restarted the Key Club. When I was a junior my parents moved to Sonora, I wanted to stay here to finish high school in the same school I was going to. Bob Jolley made that possible and his extra care and concern for me made a big difference,” Connolly said.

Connolly joined the Circle K Club in college at the University of Idaho in the early 1980s. He served as president of that club.

Connolly’s wife, Cheryl, is also a member of Kiwanis. They met in high school where they both were members of the Key Club. “We were good friends for 25 years beginning in high school. We started dating and then we got married,” Dan Connolly said.

Cheryl Connolly is an educator who currently teaches third grade at Carolyn Clark Elementary School.

For those interested in helping the community and joining the Kiwanis Club, attend the meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 20 at the new Evergreen Branch Library, 2635 Aborn Road, at Kettmann. The meeting will start at 6:30 p.m. with a half-hour social and the regular meeting will begin at 7 p.m. Jim Courtwright of Kiwanis International will speak and answer questions. The meeting will end at 8:30 p.m.

For more information, call toll free 877-549-2647 or visit www.kiwanis.org. There is also a Web site for the California, Nevada, Hawaii division at www.cnhkiwanis.org, which has a link to 11 of the 15 clubs in the South Bay and a calendar of events for club meetings and locations.