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By Robert Rosen
Hometown Weekly Staff
The Rotary Club of Wellesley is bringing Chicago City Limits, New York City’s longest running comedy improv theater group, to Wellesley on Saturday, March 12 to perform a benefit concert on Saturday, March 12 at Wellesley College’s Alumnae Hall at 7:30 p.m.
The event will raise funds for the Rotary Club’s major projects serving school age youth in Wellesley, including emotional wellness by co-facilitating coping and problem solving skills, tutoring and book buys to enhance reading and academic performance and buying trees for fourth and fifth graders to plant to keep Wellesley green.
This event will help support the Emotional Wellness Project. Wellesley has 6,000 children under 18 and 500 will experience depression if nothing is done differently. Rotary sponsors training of Interact peer leaders to care for oneself and others. Interact teens co-facilitate activities improving coping and problem-solving skills.
Some of the things this project helps with are self-awareness (muscle relaxation, visual imagery, etc.), communication (help-seeking, stigma reduction), problem solving and cognitive flexibility (PIP Problems-Ideas-Plans) and connectedness (recognizing what we have in common verse isolation).
To date, 30 Interact teens and over 500 students in Wellesley enjoy life-long benefits from this project. Beyond Wellesley, Rotary clubs from Brookline to Puerto Rico are replicating the program.
The Tutoring Project provides weekly after-school academic help to improve study skills and books to improve reading for Wellesley elementary grade students.
The Arbor Day Project provides fourth and fifth graders with 500 saplings to plant. This helps keep Wellesley green and fosters interest in the youth.
Tickets for this event are $30 for adults and $15 for students. To purchase tickets, visit www.wellesleyrotary.org and follow the links to Rotary Club of Wellesley online store. They can also be purchased at the courtesy desk at Roche Bros. or by calling the Rotary Club of Wellesley at 781-591-0759, or by calling any member of the Rotary Club.
On Friday, March 11 there will be a workshop for teens given by Chicago City Limits from 4:30-7 p.m. at Alumnae Hall.
This is sponsored by the Rotary Club of Wellesley to support adolescent wellness, a Peer to
Peer project to prevent teen suicide and depression, as well as local tutoring programs, and the Stop Hunger Now campaign. The company will work with small groups to share the skills required to improvise on stage creatively.
The workshop is free, but requires sign-up in advance. Call Andrea Kaiser, Event Chair, at 781-235-0555 to reserve a space..
Robert Rosen is an Editor at Hometown Weekly. He can be reached at news@hometownweekly.net and followed on Twitter at @roberterosen.
