Interact Visit 07/28/26
The Goshen Rotary Club had the absolute pleasure of hosting four officers of the Goshen High School Interact Club at our July 28th meeting. The Interact Club is a Rotary sponsored organization for young people, ages 12-18, that focuses on leadership development, community involvement, and the power of Service above Self. Tom Grimaldi is the Goshen Rotary Liaison and teacher, Christina Maliwacki, is the Interact Advisor.
Rotary Scholarship recipients, Yujin Rosie Li, Past President 2025-26, is off to University of Pennsylvania to study Biochemistry and Ava Carroll, Past Vice President 2025-26, is going to attend University at Buffalo for Architecture. New Co-Presidents for 2026-27 ,Tarunya Balamurali, Past Treasurer, and Rhyley Ruffy, Past Secretary, were also in attendance to recount the past year’s projects that the club of 60 members were involved in.
Pictured (l-r): Rhyley Ruffy, Yujin Rosie Li, Ava Carroll, and Tarunya Balamurali
The year started with a fall food drive where they collected over 1000 nonperishable items, a Halloween party at the Scotchtown elementary, a winter holiday season kick off in conjunction with the Leo Club, junior version of the Lions Club, where they helped with the Breakfast with Santa event and made tags for the gifts for children, at Valentines Day they wrote cards to Veterans, in March, back again to Scotchtown for St Patrick’s Day where they did storytelling, crafts and math lessons with the children. They volunteered at the Shelter Cup project selling raffle tickets. They also donated $200 from cookie sales to the Regional Food Bank and spent a day volunteering there as well! In addition to all of this!! and their studies!! the Interactors were available to help out at our major Rotary fundraisers including Flags for Heroes, Taste of Goshen, and Great American Weekend Rotary 5k/10k.
Pictured above: Rhyley Ruffy talks about his experience at RYLA with Doris Obremski. Goshen Rotary Liaison, Tom Grimaldi
Rotary District 7210 sponsors RYLA, Rotary Youth Leadership Awards, a 5-day conference at Mount St. Mary College which invites sophomores from all over the Hudson Valley to participate in activities that promote the importance of positivity, confidence, leadership with interactive presentations and fun-filled events. Rhyley Ruffy, gave a wonderful slide show presentation about his experience at RYLA, from his first year as a conferee to his second year as a junior counselor. He spoke excitedly of his first year when he was quiet and did not know any of the other participants and that by the end of the week those strangers became his friends. He loved his experience so much that he became a junior counselor his second year and met up with past conferees who also became counselors. He also showed us a website project that his group had worked on and shared that he is still in contact with the friends he made. Rhyley expressed his gratitude to our club for this opportunity, his desire to return to RYLA as a Senior Counselor, and his wish to promote Interact and the RYLA experience to other high school students.