Local civic and nonprofit organizations are being invited to participate in the Air Dot Show Central Pennsylvania May 23-25, 2026 through the Wings for a Cause™ Community Volunteer Program. This year's show is scheduled to feature the Blue Angels. Participating organizations organize volunteer teams to support event operations (hospitality, concessions, guest services), with many groups using the opportunity to support scholarships, youth programs, and local service initiatives.
If your club is looking for a project for our District’s Environment Day of Service on or near April 25, consider helping with one of the many Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful events near your club. Click here to find one in your own backyard, type in your zip code, and see if the event fits your schedule and interests. These events typically last only a few hours on a single day and are already set up and organized. They are actively looking for volunteers! Check them out!
Also consider teaming up with another Rotary club in our district. Register your Clubs Project here.
Check out the list here of projects that Clubs are already planning to complete!
Rotary Club of Carlisle – Sunrise in a partnership with Redwood Materials in Carson City, Nevada, will be collecting and recycling lithium-ion batteries and rechargeable devices. Join us on Saturday, 16 May 2026 between 10AM and 4PM at the Army Heritage Education Center Parking Lot (950 Soldiers Dr., Carlisle, PA) and bring your discarded lithium-ion batteries and rechargeable devices including smartphones, tablets, electric toothbrushes, laptops, power tool batteries, lawn equipment batteries, rechargeable vacuum batteries, wireless headphones, and any other lithium-ion battery and help close the loop.
Climate change is creating a global imperative to electrify everything from our vehicles to our grids. Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of powering all these solutions and are made up of metals like cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium along with rare earth elements. At the end of a product’s life, every rechargeable lithium-ion battery is an excellent source for making new batteries and sustainable energy products. By responsibly recycling these products and batteries, we keep them out of landfills, reduce the need to mine critical minerals both in the US and abroad, lessen foreign dependence, and help increase the security of our domestic supply chains.
Smart phones, laptops and electric vehicles all are powered by lithium-ion batteries and Redwood Materials can recover more than 95% of the metals from old, end-of-life products that serves significantly decrease the US' reliance on newly mined materials and overseas supply chains. However, today, few pathways exist to get these old products recycled responsibly resulting in a national recycling rate of about 5%. Redwood Materials is on a mission to collect as many of these old products as possible to sustainably recycle, refine, and remanufacture these batteries here in America.
Every rechargeable battery is a source for making new, more energy efficient batteries and sustainable products. Recycled batteries are actually more powerful than their new, original source batteries. Consider this, Redwood Materials’ recycling plant is entirely powered by solar energy stored in discarded Li-Ion battery banks, demonstrating a net zero carbon footprint in the pursuit of recycling Li-Ion batteries.
Note that this event is specific to lithium-ion batteries. We cannot accept other e-waste such as power cords, flat-screen TVs, printers, copiers, or circuit boards. Those items can be recycled at the Cumberland County Recycling Center (1001 Claremont Road, Carlisle, PA 17013)
We can do more. Our planet needs you. Come recycle with us!
Visit https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/ for more information, including where to find lithium-ion batteries throughout your home.
Carlisle Sunrise is eager to share lessons learned from planning, organizing, and executing the first-ever-in-Pennsylvania, Rotary collaboration with Redwood Materials, Li-Ion battery recycling project! Carlisle-Sunrise plans to engage with district officers to set up opportunities for interested clubs to learn more and possibly organize similar projects in the future. In the interim, Carlisle-Sunrise encourages clubs to collect lithium-ion batteries within their communities of influence as an environmentally themed activity either in conjunction with the upcoming Earth Day and/or Rotary’s Day of Service; and then transporting those batteries to Carlisle-Sunrise’s collection point on 16 May between 10 AM and 4 PM at the US Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle. Just collecting what you can from club members would be a great start to something more. For more information contact Mark Tillman, Carlisle-Sunrise, mtillman@ida.org
The District Learning Committee is hard at work building opportunities for our Rotarians to grow their knowledge and skills. To that end, we are starting a series of monthly on-line learning sessions on various topics that should be helpful to your Rotarians and club leaders. Please join us the 4th Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. to LEARN more about Rotary!
April 28: Club planning, goals, assessing, communicating
May 26: Youth Services (RYLA, Youth Exchange, Four-Way Test Essay & Speech)
June 23: Rotary Outside the Club
Pre-Registration for the Zoom Meetings is required! Register here to receive the Zoom link!
Can your Club find a few dynamic leaders to attend the Annual RYLA Conference?
The Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) Leadership Conference is an interactive development program designed in enhancing leadership skills in the next generation of innovative leaders. Working with students after their Junior year of high school, Rotary Clubs throughout Rotary District 7390, select up to 140 students to participate in RYLA Leadership Conference. The Conference is held in mid-June every year. The 2026 Conference will be the 64th RYLA in Rotary District 7390.
Upon arriving at RYLA, participants are assigned a Counselor and Country with up to 15 other Conferees. Conferees spend four days exploring the intricacies of leadership and how it arises in the real world. Activities focus on team building, group problem solving, and interpersonal management within project teams.
RYLA helps individuals increase their self-confidence, enhance leadership capabilities, and provides tools of communication. The result is an increase in self-efficacy, and the ability to enhance the communities you are involved in. The schedule includes various speakers, career seminars, team building activities, a conference band and chorus and much, much more.
RYLA registration will close on April 1, 2026. The fee to sponsor a RYLA Conferee is $600 per student.
Rotarians in our District have always been engaged in health-related activities, from those included in the 7 Areas of RI Focus, to many local projects such as blood donation campaigns and hospital programs.
The newly created Kareem's Mission Autism Center at Central Penn College is the inspirational effort of Rotarian Hagir Elsheikh of the Harrisburg Club, and the latest example of a goal which is of great relevance to Rotarians everywhere. Everyone is strongly encouraged to support this Center and become familiar with Kareem's Mission.
Please come to the Center on April 11 from 1 to 3:30 for an open house and a recognition lunch. There will be a Rotary Table for those wishing to join the celebration so be sure to stop by for a visit. For more information, contact Hagir at info@kareemsmission.org
Rotarians and Previous Rotarians that will be honored at the event:
Check out the Upcoming Club Events Around the District! If you want your Club events listed in the newsletter, simply send an email with details to office@rotary7390.org!
Ralph M. Serpe, Adams County Community Foundation president and CEO, was awarded the Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership Award recently from the Council on Foundations.
According to a release, the largest membership association for philanthropic foundations presented the annual Council Awards, an awards program for the philanthropic sector for more than 40 years.
This new award is presented to a leader of a community foundation that has demonstrated years of vision, leadership, impact and elevation of community philanthropy.
According to the council, the award recognizes Serpe’s impact in central Pennsylvania and draws attention to the foundation and nonprofit partners that are working daily to uplift the communities they serve in a challenging time.
“Council on Foundation awards are usually bestowed on the presidents or major national foundations: Naming someone from a small community foundation in a rural county is a significant departure and a nod to our state-wide advocacy work and local endowment building,” Serpe wrote in an email.
Serpe has shaped and led major policy changes, including changing Pennsylvania’s interstate succession laws to create a local, endowed and charitable option for the assets of Pennsylvanians who died without a will or family. In Maryland, he helped pass the Endow Maryland Tax Credit and began work on removing scholarship displacement: the practice of colleges reducing students’ financial aid by the amount of private scholarships, something he helped eliminate at public colleges in Pennsylvania. Ralph’s current legislative work includes advancing federal tax exemption for post-graduate scholarship awards and changing the charitable status of cemeteries so they can receive charitable grants.
At the Adams County Community Foundation, Serpe introduced a “forever gift” option to their annual give day allowing any donor, at any level, to contribute to a nonprofit’s endowed fund. Today, 114 nonprofits benefit from newly created designated endowment funds at the community foundation, including small, community-based nonprofits that were once excluded from endowments that now receive annual, predictable grants that strengthen their missions for the long term.
Since 2007, Serpe has led groups of community foundation peers in year-long exercises focused on building unrestricted assets, exchanging best practices and holding one another accountable for measurable progress, with more than 350 community foundations participating.
Ralph M. Serpe, Adams County Community Foundation president and CEO, was awarded the Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership Award recently from the Council on Foundations.
