The annual Lycoming County Brotherhood Alliance Awards dinner last week spotlighted four giants of our community.
How giant?
Brotherhood award winner Carol D. Sides has a stack of community involvement that could fill a book, but her most notable contribution may be for her volunteer work and advocacy against driving under the influence of alcohol.
As was pointed out, she has literally saved lives through that involvement and other affiliations.
Brotherhood award winners Dean and Amy Kreibel took the unbelievable misfortune of having a son, Andrew, born with Angelman's disease and turned it into Andrew's Special Kids Foundation. Their long-term goal is to establish a facility in Lycoming County for special needs persons.
Brotherhood sports award winner, retired state police Trooper Richard A. Reitz, is the founder of the Camp Cadet program that promotes understanding between Lycoming County youth and law enforcement officials.
The guest speaker for the evening, Rob Steele, executive director of the Community Arts Center, was correctly introduced as the man who has put "community back into the Community Arts Center."
And with such understated and warm management, Steele has taken the facility to new heights as a community lynchpin.
These are good people. They are great people whom our community is blessed to have.
How can we thank them?
Well, Steele correctly suggested that we need to do better at the whole exercise of brotherhood in our community.
We can honor and pay back these four people by taking his message to heart in our everyday dealings with everyone.
We need to make our differences secondary to the more important priority of being brothers to each other and our community will be a better place.
