NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/tag/exchange-club-of-new-canaan)
This month, NewCanaanite.com is publishing Q&As with local service organizations—volunteer groups that give back to the community while offering connection, camaraderie and fun. Today we feature the Exchange Club of New Canaan. Here’s our exchange with the nonprofit organization’s former president, Jeff Platt. ***
New Canaanite: Please give us some background on the Exchange Club. How and when did the organization start?
This week on 0684-Radi0, our free podcast (subscribe here in the iTunes Store), we talk to James Bakal, president of the Exchange Club of New Canaan. The volunteer organization’s hugely popular Christmas Tree sale—benefitting the club’s grant program in support of local nonprofits—is underway at Kiwanis Park. The tree lot is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends through Dec. 22. Visitors can buy Balsam and Fraser fir trees, as well as wreaths and other Christmas goods.
The Exchange Club of New Canaan will be hosting its 21st annual golf tournament on Tuesday, October 18th at The Woodway Country Club. Mike Abbott, program chair for the event said, “The proceeds from the tournament support the Exchange Club’s Foundation, which this year donated over $200,000 to various charities in and around New Canaan.”
The foundation’s primary mission is the prevention of child abuse, and its largest beneficiary is the Help for Kids Center in Stamford. It also supports a wide variety of other local organizations. The day will begin at 11 am with registration and lunch, followed by a shotgun start at 12:30 pm, with on-course refreshments. The day will conclude with a cocktail reception, awards ceremony, and dinner.
This week on 0684-Radi0, our free podcast (subscribe here in the iTunes Store), we talk to Exchange Club of New Canaan President George Benington about the service organization and its annual Christmas Tree and Wreath Sale. An important fundraiser benefitting local charities, it will run a little differentpodcly this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s a link to the school district’s continuously updated COVID-19 operations guide. And here are recent episodes of 0684-Radi0:
Town officials said Tuesday they’re trying to identify just where in Kiwanis Park would be the best place for a proposed open-air ice rink.
A leading contender for a seasonal rink site in New Canaan that would be open to the public with an admission charge, Kiwanis is attractive in that it has sufficiently large areas, parking, access to bathrooms, running water and electricity, and structures that could house changing areas, snack bar and skate shop, members of the Parks & Recreation Commission have said. Yet a level area out front of the main pavilion traditionally has been used by a local service organization for a large chunk of the late-November-through-February trial season that Parks & Rec has floated.
And early cost estimates to level out an area behind the pavilion and install a retaining wall there appear cost-prohibitive, a group of town officials and community volunteers said during a meeting of a Parks & Rec subcommittee. It’s also unclear whether installing the ice rink deeper into the park—on the far side of the swimming hole—would create a sufficiently attractive and workable facility, officials said during the Parks & Rec skating subcommittee meeting. While excavation, fill, retaining wall construction and other costs would push the total expense for an ice rink located between the rear of the pavilion and swimming hole to an estimated $200,000 to $250,000, creating a facility out front of the building, where the Exchange Club of New Canaan in past years has set up its approximately month-long Christmas tree sale would be far less money, official said. Rona Siegel, chair of Parks & Rec, asked whether the club had ever looked at setting up its sale in the Waveny Pool parking lot instead.
“It’s ideal,” Siegel said at the meeting, held in a conference room at Town Hall.