A giant feast to celebrate greatness.
Every Monday the Interact club meets in Danny Showers’ room to discuss the next opportunity to volunteer their time and effort in helping people from all over the world and right here in their own neighborhoods.
The Interact club’s many volunteer projects include Croc drives, turkey drives, canned food drives, coat drives, recycling cell phones, donating a Colorado Flag, and refurbishing the Thomas Jefferson portrait in the TJ community room.
“Interact club led me to join DECA and has helped enhance my leadership skills by being vice president and president. It also allowed me to enjoy volunteering,” said Michael Davis, a senior member of the Interact club.
Not many people know that Interact club is a branch of the Denver Tech-Center Rotary club, an international organization that bestows goodwill all over the world through volunteering and giving. The club is made up of teachers, company presidents, retired citizens, doctors, and volunteers.
“The club really helped me open up since I was pretty shy and it helped me become a leader,” said president Ana Chauca-Diaz.
During its end-of-the-year lunch-in, the members of the Rotary club and the members of the Interact club were brought together to celebrate their achievements and recognize three Rotary club scholarship winners. In attendance were the 25 Interact club members, school administrators, and Danny Showers, the advisor of the Interact club and member of the Rotary club.
“Normally I take a handful of students down to the Rotary club so they can see all the Rotary guys in action,” said Showers. “What made today so special, in addition to just being the end of year meeting, is the fact that there was a culmination of events that we’ve become dynamically involved in here at TJ that we’ve decided to bring closure to, and celebrate the enactment of the Interact club.”
Every year the Rotary club gives two, $2,000 scholarships to members of the Interact club, and this year the winners were Anna Chauca-Diaz, the Interact club’s president, Michael Davis, and a surprise third winner, Jay Pearson. “It was the first scholarship that I was awarded to,” Chauca-Diaz said. “I was proud of all three of us.”
“All a student has to do is become a member of the club is come to the meetings, be a senior, and be actively involved in the projects that we do,” Showers explained. “We had three people apply this year and these three people were so dynamically involved in all the projects that the Rotary club decided to give away three scholarships instead of the normal two.”
In addition to recognizing the scholarship winners, the Interact club also gave recognition to Paul and Karen Swedhin who painted the Community Room, and revealed the refurbished Thomas Jefferson Portrait. The members also recognized Larry McLaughlin, a Rotarian who donated money to Project Heifer, an organization based in Arkansas that buys and ships animals to third world countries for farming. Deciding to match McLaughlin’s donation, the Interact club managed to raise $5,000 for Project Heifer and bought hundreds of animals to be sent to the other side of the world where they would be used not for slaughter but for cultivating food.
The Interact club not only volunteers its time to the TJ community but it also does its part in combating world hunger one family at a time. “This club is doing a lot of good,” Showers said with pride. “I’m really proud to be the Interact club advisor to good students and great kids.”
