Volunteer Spotlight: Rose Silletto

April 14, 2023| People

By: Caitlin Doran

To help kick off volunteer appreciation week (April 16-22), we’d like to shine a spotlight on a new Lake Hopatcong Foundation volunteer who has been diligently helping us “behind the scenes” since February.

Meet Rose Silletto! Rose is in her second year at Rochester Institute of Technology, and, along with her parents and twin sister, Eliza, she is a new lake resident and a transplant from Teaneck, NJ. The Silletto family moved to the lake in August of 2022, but I first met Rose in 2015 when she was an active and engaged member of Teaneck Girl Scout Troop 60019. She and her merry band of twelve-year-old cohorts were on a mission to help Hackensack Riverkeeper, where I worked at the time, clean up another body of water, the Hackensack River.

Troop 19, with support from talented leaders Kelly Sheehan and Jean Meyers, took their volunteering one step further. Inspired by cleanups along the Hackensack River and a 4-minute video about the “lifecycle” of a plastic bag, the Troop set out on a campaign to enact the first plastic bag legislation in northern New Jersey as part of their Bronze Award (this was ahead of the statewide plastic bag ban). And they were successful!

The plastic bag bill that the troop successfully passed in Teaneck – by attending council meetings, hosting outreach tables at events, and creating their own educational video – served as the spark that led Rose to a major in New Media Interactive Development (and sister Eliza to a major in public policy).

“In high school, I was interested in photography, video, film, and programming,” says Rose. “And when I was working on the bag bill, I became very interested in the domino effect of spreading a message,” she continued. Her major, which the uninitiated can think of as software development, “felt like a perfect marriage of the two: media and the power to tell a message and inspire people to act.”

Before volunteering at the Foundation, Rose worked in another historic location: the Brooklyn Naval Yard, which is now a growing ecosystem of businesses operating at the intersection of manufacturing, design, and technology. At Duggal Visual Solutions, Rose programmed industrial-sized printers to include strings of text and information on printed materials. She liked that job but said it was a very different dynamic than at the Foundation. “Here, even when you’re indoors, you feel like you’re in nature. The office is very friendly, dynamic, collaborative, and positive.”

I asked Rose if she purposefully seeks out environmental causes when she volunteers, and she said not necessarily, but that she has always been rooted in nature and the outdoors. Her Troop made wonderful memories camping and naming all the different animals and insects they saw, which turned into an inside joke, resulting in t-shirts with the names of all the animals from their camping trip.

While Rose spent her winter helping with donor database “to-dos”, she’s excited to embrace more outdoor volunteer work through our Block Party event and Field Trip program. She also worked previously as a junior camp counselor for Teaneck Charter School’s musical theater camp, where she had a knack for connecting with kids. “They used to follow me around and ask where I was if I was absent,” Rose says. “I like working with kids. I don’t baby them. I treat them like people, because, well, they are!”

When Rose was younger, her family visited Lake George (no, not that Lake George - a smaller, lesser-known Lake George in Michigan). Her father’s family owned a cottage there, and they have lots of happy memories, which inspired them to “take the leap” and relocate from Teaneck, where Rose and Eliza grew up, to a lakefront home in King Cove on Lake Hopatcong. Rose lists the abundance of nature and the calming effects of the water as some of the many benefits of moving. She does miss the 10-minute walk to friends and to shops on Cedar Lane in Teaneck, which is more of an urban setting; however, she’s excited for the trade-off of boating to many of her destinations, now that the warm-weather months are here.

When she’s not volunteering at the Foundation, Rose enjoys playing video games, Dungeons and Dragons, and reading. Her preferred genre is science fiction, and she’s just finished reading The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. Her family enjoys attending Broadway shows (two very big thumbs up for Fat Ham) and speaking engagements, like COSMOS: Possible Worlds, with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, at the 92nd Street Y. This summer, Rose would really like to learn how to water ski, and she has yet to try Cliff’s ice cream -something we intend to remedy immediately!

THIS JUST IN: we’ve now learned Rose was recently spotted at Cliff’s ordering Rocky Road. We await her review!