TAKE FIVE!

October 27, 2020

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Hi, I’m Meaghan Mullally-Gorr. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents Take Five!. Our guests today are Dr. Bruce Ellsweig and Mrs. Karen Ellweig, welcome. Thank you both for joining us today. Thank you so much. Can you each introduce yourselves and tell us about your current positions and or organizations, and maybe mention a little bit about how you’re involved with Sullivan 180.

Karen Ellsweig:
I am currently a member of the town board of the town of Forestburgh. I’m a committee member on the grant committee of the community foundation of Sullivan and Orange counties. I’m vice chair of the Kiwanis organization in Monticello, a grant and loan committee member of the revolving loan fund of Sullivan County. I’m a health champion, proud health champion for Sullivan 180 for the town of Forestburgh. And I’m a five-year volunteer with Sullivan Renaissance busy, but love every bit of it. And I’m a recovering attorney, but we won’t go there.

Dr. Bruce Ellsweig:
And I’m a physician, I’m a family doctor at Crystal Run Healthcare, I’m board certified in family medicine and hospice and palliative care. I’m the chairman of the public health advisory committee for the Sullivan County public health services. And I’m also the medical director for Sullivan County public health services. I’m also a social volunteer with the Forestburgh Fire Company. I’m a member of Kiwanis in Monticello as well. I’m a Sullivan Renaissance volunteer and both Karen and I are on the fundraising committee for Forestburgh Lighthouse.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Such great admirable positions. It’s so nice to talk to you guys and what a pleasure to have you in Sullivan County. So Karen we’ll start with you, if you don’t mind. Can you tell us a little bit about Sullivan Club 180?

Karen Ellsweig:
Sure. We started pretty early on, we have a pretty active group, we’ve had many meetings, usually meet about once a month, average between 12 and 15 attendees which is terrific. And we try to keep the topics of discussion or presentation around something to do with healthy living, health care, et cetera. We had a panel discussion on immunizations and public health very early on. We’ve had sessions on guided imagery, mindfulness, herbal medicine, which was a terrific session. And our, our winner by far as far as attendance, we’ve had a yoga session and that turned into a ongoing to this day, probably a year later, full-time yoga offering in the town of Forestburgh, which is still running over zoom right now. We’ve had sessions on therapeutic massage. We had NAMI come in and speak on mental health. And my husband’s favorite session was at the firehouse where they spoke on home safety. And some of the speakers have actually touched base with me anxious to come back, which as soon as we’re able to have an in place meeting, we’ll start up again. One of the things that we’ve done, which was very unique and worked well for our group is we started each meeting with an ice breaker. So I have a deck of cards that have pictures and questions on them, and I would volunteer a couple of people to pick a card, and then they would either have to spontaneously speak about the picture or about the question. So we learned a lot of wonderful things about each other just by starting each meeting with that kind of honest, open thing, which, which led to a lot of comeraderie. So we all miss that. And hopefully we’ll get back to that.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Is your group exclusive to your area in which you live, or are there others that are able to join your group? And if so, how?

Karen Ellsweig:
We have opened up our group to anybody who wants to attend. And once we get back up and running, we will start putting our agendas, our plans with Sullivan 180 on their website. And we have a general store in our town, which offered a post-it for us on their Facebook. We have invited people from all over and it maybe the second meeting, it was everybody’s homework to bring another person with them, whether they lived in town or not. And that worked out very well and we’ve retained some of those members.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Good. So anyone interested in joining your wellness group, they could certainly get in touch with Sullivan 180 and we’ll connect you all. What are your hopes for your group as soon as we enter a phase in which we can all gather socially.

Karen Ellsweig:
I’d like to start up again with our speaker series, because that’s really been very successful, that we have somebody speak at each meeting. We have two different speakers who were scheduled, but will be rescheduled from the Alzheimer’s association. One to speak on prevention of Alzheimer’s and one to speak about living with a loved one with Alzheimer’s. We have a session scheduled, we’ll be scheduled on healthy cooking. One that would be vegetarian and one that would be not vegetarian. We had to cancel in March our session on mindful eating, but we’re definitely going to do that one again, because that’s been a big demand. And meditation. We’ve had guided meditation, but now we, we want to have people in to talk about how to set up your own meditation practice.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Is there, is there anything else that you’d like to add.

Karen Ellsweig:
If anybody is interested in starting up a 180 group we’d like some advice as far as working with their locality to be a health champion, I’m happy to talk to anybody. When we started out, we did a survey in our town, which was very successful that we based our offerings on the answers to those surveys. So we have ideas about how to start up a program like this, how to keep it going. So that really, I would put that out there. If there’s someone who’s interested or would like to come and sit in on one of our sessions to see how we do it.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
That’s a wonderful thing to offer. Thank you so much. That’s great.

Karen Ellsweig:
And thank you for the opportunity to be a health champion. I’ve really, really enjoyed it.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Thank you so much.