Chapter Outreach to Bridgewater Retirement Community

by RoxAnna Theiss

Our beloved training room at BRC. © Malcolm Cameron

Headwaters has been extremely fortunate to have space in the Houff Center at the Bridgewater Retirement Community for our Basic Training classes since the Fall of 2012. It is a beautiful space and well equipped. It comes with wireless Internet connection, a projector screen and a set up and break down crew who always see eagerly to our needs. It is highly unlikely we could do better for convenience and location as it almost straddles the Augusta/Rockingham County line.

The Headwaters Board and the Basic Training Committee have been struggling for over a year for a way to show our appreciation and to continue to cement the bond with BRC. We tried offering scholarships with free tuition for two members of the Bridgewater Community who qualify but so far that hasn’t been something of interest to any BRC resident. So we thought: they need to understand the program better; we’ll offer a presentation to their Residents Association to accomplish that. Even that was proving more difficult than we expected and it wasn’t until a new Resident’s Association Board was elected the first of 2014 that we began to make headway toward being scheduled for one of their monthly meetings.

Finally, at the April meeting of the Residents Association of the Bridgewater Retirement Community, we had our moment. After being treated to a very fine lunch at the BRC Dining Room by the Binghams who are co-Vice Presidents of Programs for the BRC Resident’s Association, our Advisory Board President, Tom Long, Training Committee member Carl Droms and I joined our Chapter Advisor Paul Bugas and Membership Committee co-chairs Dwayne and Pat Martin for a 20 minute presentation followed by a Question and Answer session about the Virginia Master Naturalist Program and the Basic Training provided by Headwaters.

The PowerPoint presentation was concluded with a slide show set to music that Tom created highlighting the field trips his class took from 2012 – 2013. The whole presentation was well received by an audience of close to eighty residents. We stayed afterward for a good half hour to talk and share with the people who had come to hear us speak. The reports we got from Kay and Fletcher Bingham indicated the members of the Association appreciated our enthusiasm and dedication and enjoyed learning about the Program. It does appear, however that scholarships will not be the answer to how we can show the Bridgewater Community how much we appreciate their generosity.