Events are free and held on the third Friday of each month except August and December. In-person events are located at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at 700 Callahan Drive in Bremerton. Sign-in begins at 6:00, with introductions at 6:30. Zoom link now has its own page on our website with multiple options for signing in.

May 17, 2024 – Drea Bowen, MSW, ESA, One Heart Wild Education Sanctuary. This organization is dedicated to advancing human understanding of Trans-species Psychology and to using their knowledge of it to improve the health and well-being of their clients. Their sanctuary is not only designed for client services, but also for the needs of the non-human animals that live there. They consider advocacy for the humane treatment of animals and responsible environmental stewardship to be essential parts of their organizational mission. Their educational programs include elementary school presentations on animals and empathy, and event speaker presentations on our therapy services and educational programs, and other topics.

June 21, 2024 – Bob Abel, Olympic College (Emeritus), DiRAC Institute, Dept. of Astronomy, University of Washington: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory: What This Amazing Instrument Will Teach Us. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is scheduled to begin operations in early 2025. Located on an Andean peak, with a huge mirror and the largest digital camera ever built, its mission is to take deep, panoramic images of the sky every 30 seconds, all night long. Every three nights it will map the entire night sky, and it will repeat this process for ten years. This is by far the most ambitious sky survey ever: in just its first two months of operation, it will gather more data than all of the telescopes in history.

July 19, 2024 – Ann A. Rudnicki, What do Palestinians Want, and How the Heck Did We Get to This Point? Ann A. Rudnicki retired from a long career in the human services sector she began in 1978 working with street kids in New York City. At the beginning of this Century, she took a mid-life break to achieve a Ph.D. in Public & International Affairs and to conduct research in Russia. Since her retirement, she has pursued her interest in international affairs, first a Peace Corps assignment in Poltava, Ukraine, where she served as a management consultant to a multi-program social service agency centered around services for people with HIV. Since then, she has studied the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and has done some time volunteering in the West Bank, including during a time of high conflict.