Other Voices

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Karen Williams, Linda Zell, and Megan Connolly consider themselves to be sisters.

“The bond is that strong,” said Connolly in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

The three women are not related by blood. Rather, they are part of what they describe as a “church family.”

They belong to St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

Williams, who does academic advising at the University at Albany, came to the church when her daughter was a baby — she’s a teenager now. But Williams still calls herself a “newbie.”

That’s because Zell, who recently retired from Tax and Finance, and Connolly, a stay-at-home mom who works now at Bella Fleur in the village, have each spent a lifetime in the church. Both of them were baptized at St. John’s and married in the church.

Zell’s father was a member of the church and so was her grandmother. Connolly, who has four children and seven grandchildren, says her children who live elsewhere have come back with their babies to have them baptized at St. John’s.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/08262022/st-johns-celebrates-150-years-community-caring-and-cooking

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