Joan Mckeon had an awakening as she mowed her lawn — a job she hated.“It smelled bad, it was noisy, and the little creatures would run for their lives,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.The less lawn she mowed, the more native plants grew up. “They would bloom and then they’d be covered with bees,” she said.Similarly, plants in her garden beds had been purchased at a garden center and came from other parts of the world.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/02032023/mckeon-says-nurturing-nature-native-plants-something-everyone-can-do Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joan Mckeon says, nurturing nature is something everyone can do

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Richard Umholtz: The Mountain Family wants to mentor

Emily Vincent is carrying on a legacy.A sheep farmer in Berne, Vincent had a brain tumor removed in January of 2020.“After I got out of my surgery, I had just the most horrendous vertigo that you could ever have,” recalls Vincent in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “It was really hard.”Vincent, a registered nurse, had regularly commuted to New York City where she worked in intensive-care units.Now, she couldn’t stand up for long. “When I stood up, I was teetering. I looked like I was perpetually drunk. I couldn’t drive, so I couldn’t get down to my job in New York City.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emily Vincent in Berne carries on a sheep legacy

Julia Young, a student at Clayton A. Bouton High School, is one of 25 seniors in New York State nominated as a Presidential Scholar, a recognition the Regents chancellor called “the pinnacle” — and yet Julia Young is humble.The day after the nominations were announced, Young told The Enterprise she was surprised by the accolade.“I like being challenged,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast of what motivates her. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julia Young, a presidential scholar nominee who likes being challenged

Year in review — The Altamont Enterprise 2022

Christine Galvin helps abused and neglected children who have fled their homelands in hopes of building a better life in the United States.She has spent up to a thousand hours each year for more than five years working, for free, to help them.Asked why, Galvin says simply, “They all need help.”Pressed further, she says, “Because I speak Spanish and because I’m a lawyer, it’s a perfect set of skills to do this kind of work. So how could I not?”Galvin, who lives in New Scotland, has responded to prejudice against immigrants, undocumented workers, writing in a letter to the Enterprise editor, “Undocumented immigrants are contributing members of our society and deserve to be treated as such.”She says in this week’s Enterprise podcast of the kids she represents, “They work hard and they do jobs nobody wants to do.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Attorney Christine Galvin: Brave children fleeing terror have a friend

Paul Steinkamp wishes that, when he was a child, someone had taught him how to fold a piece of paper in half.As he talks about the art and science of origami, which he came to late in life, he sounds like a poet.“The greatest gift you could ever give a child, as far as I’m concerned, is to introduce them to folding paper ….,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “You can fold paper for the rest of your life and you will still have some discovery … It’s a river. It reminds you you have a brain and you have fingers … It’s something that no other living thing can do.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A fold or a twist or a coil is the stuff of dreams for Steinkamp

Alexandra Fasulo last month published her first book and calls it “my favorite thing I’ve ever done.”She has done a lot while still in her 20s.She owns the weekly gig economy newsletter, the Forum, as well as Fortuna Forum, a suite of online financial resources; she is a CNBC contributor; and she hosts the Freelance Fairytales podcast. She says she has over 900,000 followers across social media.Fasulo describes her book, “Freelance Your Way to Freedom: How to Free Yourself From the Corporate World and Build the Life of Your Dreams,” published by John Wyle & Sons, as “a generic freelancing Bible.”She had such fun writing the book, she says she has a running list of 20 other titles ready to go right now. Ten of them are business topics, including side hustles, freelancing, the business of want, and virtual assistants.She also loves philosophy and writing poetry and, noting there are many books about dogs, wants to write about her Siamese cat who was her constant companion for 20-and-a-half years but died last summer.Fasulo spoke to The Enterprise from the United Kingdom, where she is traveling through England and Scotland, which has inspired her to want to write fiction or fantasies, Fasulo said. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexandra Fasulo writes of freelancing her way to freedom

Peggy Filkins Warner says she learned to be independent from her grandfather.“That’s where I got my attitude,” she said of her father and his father.She was born in the Filkins farmhouse on Joslyn School Road in 1930, in an era when not a lot of women were involved in politics.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11252022/peggy-warner-says-our-country-gives-people-right-choose Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peggy Warner: ‘Our country gives people the right to choose’

Penny Shaw Bartley has always loved to sing and entertain people.It started when she was a kid growing up on a farm in Michigan. She and her siblings worked in the fields, “hoeing out weeds and driving the tractor and feeding the animals,” says Shaw in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11172022/delving-her-familys-history-shaw-creates-goosen-musical Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Penny Shaw creates “Goosen, The Musical”

David Rodney Miller describes himself as an 85-year-old pacifist.He says, though, that he has been in a war of one kind or another for most of his life and cites his time in the Peace Corps, which he terms “war on war”; his role in the Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty; and in the war on racism, working with a state Commission on Human rights.Miller, who lives now in New Scotland, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised, with three brothers, on a farm in a small town on the outskirts of the city. It was a “very, very poor area,” Miller says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/11132022/life-time-pacifist-takes-children-seriously Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Rodney Miller,  a life-time pacifist takes children seriously

Sandra Dollard, a woman known for her warmth and sense of style, ran Evoke Style, a women’s fashion boutique, in Stuyvesant Plaza for more than a decade.“I had cancer and I got myself through chemo and I wanted to help other people,” Dollard says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “When I closed my business, I wanted to find someplace to help somebody run their business.”She found that place at the Guilderland Chamber of Commerce. Dollard is the chamber’s new executive director.Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/11042022/chamber-leader-dollard-creating-connections Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sandra Dollard, leading Guilderland Chamber, creating connections

Last week, John McDonnell, who directs the Guilderland Food Pantry, talked to a woman in her early seventies who had been retired for about five years.He recounts their conversation in this week’s Enterprise podcast.“She said, ‘You know, I worked my entire life. And now I don’t have enough. And I don’t know what to do.’”McDonnell said, “It breaks my heart.”He knows what it feels like to need help.When McDonnell started his career at Veterans Affairs, he was a full-time government worker, married with two kids. “And I qualified for WIC,” he said of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. “I qualified for reduced lunches at school and I missed qualifying for food stamps by $25 a week.“The first time I had to walk into WIC …,” he said, “‘Humbled’ is probably not even the word for it … It sucks, honestly.”He wants Guilderland residents to know they will be welcomed at the food pantry. “If they’re hungry, they’re not going to leave that way …. One person at a time, we can change the world.”Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/10282022/guilderland-food-pantry-director-says-if-you-need-us-were-here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guilderland Food Pantry director says: ‘If you need us, we’re here’

Wendy Dwyer is a lifelong activist who is going to take her commitment to recycling and fighting pollutants all the way to the grave. Literally.She has signed up for a green burial.“I’m going to go in… a totally biodegradable wool blanket and plant flowers on me. No chemicals. No embalming fluid …. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” says Dwyer, a registered nurse, in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Dwyer was raised in Guilderland Center by a mother, a nursing professor, who “was a big follower of Rachel Carson and ‘Silent Spring,’” she said, referencing the 1962 book that documented the harm caused by pesticides and sparked the modern environmental movement.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/10272022/wendy-dwyer-holds-hope-she-fights-against-all-odds-better-world Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wendy Dwyer holds on to hope as she fights for a better world

Mildred and Alan Zuk are consummate givers.Constant in their commitments, they have been married for 50 years.Throughout that half-century, Alan has been involved either driving school buses for Berne-Knox-Westerlo or supervising the transportation department.He has also served Berne as supervisor and as a town justice.Millie taught elementary school children for 35 years, along with coaching cross-country and track, and then went on to earn certification as an emergency medical technician to help with the Helderberg Ambulance squad.Alan says he can pinpoint the event that made him get involved in community service. In 1977, as members of the Berne Reformed Church — another long-time commitment for the couple — the Zuks were involved in an activity at the church hall when the fire siren sounded.“Basically, every man left our activity to go fight the fire except me …,” Alan recalls in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “That’s when I joined the fire company.”Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/10072022/millie-and-alan-zuk-lifelong-care-community Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Millie and Alan Zuk: Lifelong care for community

Nadia Raza was visiting family in Pakistan this summer when the floods came.“We didn’t even know. I woke up one morning and I had text messages and Facebook messages from the entire Altamont community,” said Raza who owns a Pakistani restaurant in the village.Heavier monsoon rains and melting glaciers combined to put half of Pakistan under water, affecting 33 million people and causing losses of over $40 billion.“We woke up watching the news and realizing that a third of the country was wiped away …,” Raza says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “We were seeing millions, millions of people had become homeless, lost their homes, lost their lives.”Raza’s family, living in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, were safe. But news videos brought the horror into their homes.“Flocks of people just walking in these big bodies of water … and the one guy I remember saying, you know, we’ve been walking for ten, 12 hours … and one of the kids is bound to get tired,” said Raza, describing the news clips. “And I’m thinking in my head, ‘Oh, my God, how are they going to get through this? You know, if somebody gets tired and there’s water all the way to their knees, how are they going to sleep?’”Raza contacted The Enterprise in hopes of raising public awareness about the need for aid. “I don’t think that it’s getting the amount of publicity and the amount of help that they should be getting,” she said.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09292022/nadia-raza-follows-her-passions-fashion-pakistani-food-and-helping-after-her-homeland-was Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nadia Raza follows her passions — for fashion, food, and helping

When Sarah Walsh was working with indigenous people in Canada, she experienced a national Thanksgiving address.“It is a way of acknowledging every piece of the Earth … and to center yourself in your role as a human being in the Earth, not on the Earth, but in the Earth, and how it influences who you are and how life happens,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Walsh is now the associate director of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy where she oversees an initiative to honor the indigenous history of the Bozen Kill Conservation Corridor. On Friday, a ceremony was held to celebrate new kiosk signs at the Bozen Kill and Wolf Creek Falls Preserves to inform visitors of the land’s history.https://altamontenterprise.com/09252022/indigenous-ways-knowing-are-totem-sarah-walsh Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Indigenous ways of knowing are a totem for Sarah Walsh

Bernard Melewski has spent most of his life working as an environmental lobbyist, and eight years writing a book about it.“Inside the Green Lobby: The Fight to Save the Adirondack Park” has just been published by the State University of New York Press.Melewski, who grew up in Halfmoon, has an abiding love for the Adirondacks and continues to be vitally interested in the park’s welfare.“I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to have an outsized influence for one individual …,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “I often describe myself as a political scientist with a law degree and, as a political scientist, to be able to be at the front lines of influence and change over a long period of time, especially on things that are important to all of us, like the environment, I just couldn’t possibly imagine a better career outcome for me.” One of his important contributions, detailed in the book, was to help end, or at least limit, the acid rain that was killing Adirondack wildlife. Read the full story at Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bernard Melewski shares stories of lobbying to save the Adirondack Park

Life and art are often intertwined for Chris Howard.She sees communication as a common thread in her life, taking her from parts she played in the school productions of her childhood through a career as a speech and language pathologist, to a never-ending passion for community theater and now founding a company to make a documentary about local activists.Howard first trod the boards as a Voorheesville Elementary School fifth-grader, playing the part of Alice in “Alice in Wonderland” — her mother made her costume.Before she graduated from high school, Howard had directed Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and donated the proceeds to the Heldeberg Workshop.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09122022/chris-howard-documenting-stories-world-needs-hear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Howard is documenting ‘stories that the world needs to hear’

Laura Barry is like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed.Except, instead of planting apple trees, which originated in Asia, she is planting native trees.“I planted about 15 trees this year, little saplings and things all over the place secretly,” she says, improving open land.Barry explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast that she was removing a friend’s Oriental bittersweet, which kills trees “because it strangles them,” when she discovered the maple saplings.“I’m growing them so I can go get more next year …,” she said. “Oh, it's fun!”Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09062022/laura-barry-plants-hope-along-native-trees Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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