Ulster County Women’s Network is moving into a bright and joyful season, bringing the light of friendships, both rekindled and newly minted, to the coming New Year. Please join us to celebrate together with a sit-down dinner at Savona’s on December 13.
This dinner is an opportunity for us to catch up with each other in person. We’ll collaboratively share our ideas for programming so please think about the programs and activities you would like UCWN to offer. Getting together itself breaks the isolation of this long period we’ve endured and seeing friends and doing interesting activities together enhances the quality of our lives. This is your network. Think about what inspires you and makes UCWN events relevant. Let’s plan our event calendar for the upcoming year together with fun! Invite your friends!
Sheila Gould, VP of UCWN, has listened to some of the interests you’ve expressed for more informal get togethers. We’ll introduce bi-weekly “walks and talks” for exercise and conversation. Wellness events will include events on mind-body-spirit self care and health. We’ll also have enjoyable book talks by authors, poetry readings, art studio and gallery tours, music and theater events, gardening, travel, yoga and meditation, culinary events and dancing at venues like Keegan’s for the fun of it. Our social organization gives us opportunities to enjoy cultural activities together.
At our December dinner, we will have Melody Newcombe’s Memory Book for you to sign, if you haven’t already. Please bring photos, stories, poems, memories, drawings, and music links you would like included in the keepsake for her family from UCWN in appreciation for her many years as an inspiring leader. We will present the family with this keepsake for her daughters and grands, so they can appreciate an aspect of Melody that we all knew—that vibrant force that connected women in our area. We will present it to the family in January of 2023. In the spring, we plan to visit the Old Dutch Church in Kingston to see Melody’s ashes, mixed into the sugar maple tree root soil, that was planted by her family.
UCWN is a collaborative association of volunteers, with a couple of technical paid consultants making the structure possible. Many of our members have been past officers and have contributed to the UCWN in countless important ways. Consider becoming engaged in UCWN leadership roles for programming, tech support, treasury, and co-ordination with walks and talks, zoom support, outreach, media, public relations, articles, event posts of outside events by our members to give them our support.
We will also carry forward our discussion of “Choice” as a legal right for women’s health care and self body management for reproductive decisions. Ellen Messer, a recent event speaker, introduced the idea of new semantics to change the narrative by reframing this issue. Thank you, Ellen, for donating copies of your book, “Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era,” to be “donation-purchase” at independent, area bookstores: Rough Draft in Kingston, Inquiring Minds in Saugerties and New Paltz, Golden Notebook in Woodstock, and Oblong Books in Rhinebeck. These $20 donations for Ellen’s book on the dark days pre-Roe vs. Wade will go to Mid-Hudson League of Women Voters through UCWN. Ellen’s book is important to mobilize us all to stand our ground and strategically brainstorm on where we go from here.
Gloria Waslyn
President UCWN