Jim Doherty wasn’t shopping for a benefactor for his Tranquility House for Addiction Recovery in Unity. He was too busy providing a place to stay and an empathetic ear and rides to work and to medical appointments for the five men currently staying at his halfway house.
Then Kimball Union Academy junior Sam Weinberger called with an offer to stage a piano concert to raise money for Doherty’s work. This year’s concert is scheduled for Saturday night at 7 at the Lake Sunapee Protective Association headquarters in Sunapee.
“He said he’d heard about us and wanted to help out,” Doherty, a self-employed carpenter by trade, said on Monday. “It’s crazy. It’s like TV. It’s not the kind of thing that happens in my life.”
Going to the keyboard in support of good causes has been part of Sam Weinberger’s life since he was a seventh-grader at Sunapee Middle High School.
“I needed a project for my bar mitzvah,” Weinberger recalled last week. “I decided to do a concert to help a survivor of a car accident in Houston.”
After raising $500 that first year, Weinberger started looking around his own backyard for people to help, and hasn’t looked back since: In 2013 and 2014, proceeds from his concerts supported the Newport Food Pantry.
And last spring, he raised $1,200 for the New England Healing Sports Association, which provides ski lessons and adaptive equipment for the disabled.
“There are tons of causes,” Weinberger said. “I like to do causes that are more local. They’re more meaningful to me.”
That urge to serve helped convince Susan Sorensen of Hanover to provide Weinberger with piano lessons, at the request of the director of Kimball Union’s community chorus, which Sorensen accompanies at rehearsals and concerts.
“I initially said ‘no,’ ” Sorensen, whose day job is a skin-therapy business, recalled on Monday. “I was way too busy. I didn’t have the time I felt that Sam deserved.”
Finally, they settled on two lessons a month, on the days Sorensen is already at KUA for the chorus rehearsals. And soon enough, Sorensen got a sense of Weinberger’s abilities.
“Sam plays by ear very, very well,” Sorensen said. “He has a great sense of lyricism, plays with a lot of depth for a young person his age, a lot of sensitivity.
“And what is remarkable is his commitment to giving back to the community. It’s notable for anyone, but particularly for a young person who’s a full-time student, and busy with extracurricular activities like sports.”
Somehow Weinberger found the time among those activities, plus recording a CD with the help of KUA music teacher Robert Singley, to ask around for another good cause. Eventually, the Rev. Alice Roberts, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Newport, steered him to Tranquility House, where he told Doherty that his goal is to raise around $1,500 — a windfall for a program that receives no state support and relies on donations.
“It won’t put us in the black, but it will cover a lot of things,” said Doherty, who said he became clean and sober in 1987 and began looking for ways to help others. “I do a lot of driving of guys to appointments, and the roads around here are pretty rough, so there’s a lot of vehicle maintenance.
“The next bill is always coming in.”
To help offset some of them, Sam Weinberger will play a mix of his own compositions, some improvisations, and works of classical and jazz composers.
“It’ll be a little bit of everything,” he said.
Pianist Sam Weinberger performs at the Lake Sunapee Protective Association, 63 Main St. in Sunapee, on Saturday night from 7 to 8. Admission is $5 to $15. Donations of food and of men’s clothing also are welcome, and Weinberger will be selling copies of his new CD of piano solos for $10 each. Benefactors who cannot make it to the concert can donate by visiting dm2.gofund.me/benefitconcert2016.
Kendal at Hanover recently awarded scholarships of $2,500 each to three Upper Valley high school students who work part-time at the retirement community.
Hartford High School senior Emma Prime of White River Junction received her award from a fund named for former Kendal resident Joseph W. Davis. A Kendal employee since 2013, Prime is a member of the Hartford High chapter of the National Honor Society, and has earned awards for excellence in biology, French and math. She also created a group of volunteers to help a class of third-graders with math.
Kendal’s Residents Council Scholarship went to Eric Knapp of Lebanon, a home-schooled student who also attends the Hartford Area Career Technology Center. Along with earning student of the year honors for automotive technology, he has participated in the Vermont state science fair, competed for the Upper Valley Rowing Association, participated in an entrepreneurship program for young people and worked two jobs in addition to his duties at Kendal. He aims to study aviation technology at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.
Hartford High senior Keaton Simmons, of White River Junction, received the Kendal at Hanover Administrative Scholarship. In addition to regularly earning a place on the Hartford High honor roll and studying Advanced Placement calculus and French, he has played varsity football and lacrosse.
The Institute for Educational Advancement (IEA) recently named Katherine Duan of Hanover one of 29 students nationwide to whom it will pay full tuition to attend high schools of their choice. Duan, a seventh-grader at Crossroads Academy in Lyme, will attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.
To learn more about the IEA’s Caroline D. Bradley Scholars program, and to find an application, visit educationaladvancement.org.
Claremont’s Disnard Elementary School recently earned an honorable mention from New Hampshire Kids Count for increasing the number of students who participate in Disnard’s breakfast program over the past two years.
In a letter to the school announcing the award, Lauren Young, outreach coordinator for New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, congratulated school administrators for recruiting 63.5 percent more students who are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches and 73.1 percent among all students between October 2013 and October 2015.
For more information about participating in the New Hampshire School Breakfast Challenge, visit nhschoolbreakfast.org.
Students in grades 3, 4 and 5 at Hartland Elementary School recently observed National Public Health Week by sending thank-you notes to three Major League Baseball clubs for banning tobacco from their ballparks. In addition to hailing the Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers for making Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium tobacco-free, some of the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders have been meeting weekly with Hartland middle-schoolers who belong to the Windsor County chapter of Vermont Kids Against Tobacco.
Kyra Taylor of Meriden earned a berth on the dean’s list at the University of New England, for her academic performance during the first semester of her freshman year at the Biddeford, Maine, institution. In addition to making the grade in the classroom as a nursing major, Taylor, a 2015 graduate of Lebanon High School, has been starting regularly for UNE’s women’s lacrosse team, which is playing in the conference finals this week.
Simmons College in Boston recently named Jacquelyn Noyes of White River Junction to its dean’s list for maintaining a grade-point average of at least 3.5. Noyes is majoring in nursing.
The Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst recently conferred its W.E.B. Du Bois Outstanding Achievement Award on senior Isaiah Fariel of Hanover, a 2012 graduate of Hanover High School.
The Claremont School District and the TLC Family Resource Center in Claremont are inviting educators, families of young children and the general public to Stevens High School in Claremont tonight for a screening of the documentary Raising New Hampshire: the Early Years. The film, which includes interviews of Claremont families, is the first in a series that the school district and the resource center will show on the need for early diagnosis of special needs, and early intervention.
The 30-minute video will start running at 6:30. After the screening, a panel of experts will lead a discussion of early-childhood development. For more information, email the school district’s assistant superintendent at cleclair@sau6.org or at 603-543-4200, or contact Maggie Monroe-Cassel of TLC at 603-542-1848 or maggie@tlcfamilyrc.org.