(Apr 23, 2024)
David Henseler, Past-President of South Bay Sunrise Rotary Club, has led community service projects for many years. He has been promoting the Camp Pendleton Community Service Fund (collecting baby products and household items for Marine families on the base). He and Karen Greenberg collect these donated supplies from District 5280 Rotarians at their home in Torrance several times a year to ship to Camp Pendleton. (Watch for announcements about the next collection date.)
 
The Pendleton Community Service Fund (https://cpcsf.org/) was started in 2004 by a new Rotary Club in Camp Pendleton, to help military families there. Donations are stored in the Warrior Warehouse at the North end of Camp Pendleton. Every Friday morning, the warehouse is opened so that young military families can select from goods such as baby products, glassware, linens, pots and pans, and lightly-used furniture, at no charge. The Rotarians also built and inscribed a Memorial Wall with names of over 1,600 Marines and Sailors who passed through Camp Pendleton and died in Iraq and Afghanistan. David is trying to recruit more Rotary Clubs in Orange County to support this ongoing project.
 
David is also active in Rise Against Hunger (https://www.riseagainsthunger.org/), an organization established to provide support and packets of food to delivered to people in various countries where people are starving because of natural disasters and man-made disasters. Their goal is to pack and send out 50,000 meals per year, including soy, rice, vitamins, and other nutrients. These packets are shipped out in boxes of limited size and weight to minimize shipping costs. They periodically solicit volunteers and support to assemble these food packages. (The next scheduled date is Nov 9, 2024, at the Torrance YMCA; watch for announcements for volunteers.)