Great Barrington — In recognition of her virtue of service, Ruby Chang received the Rotary Club’s Citizen of the Year Award during the club’s meeting on Wednesday, September 11, at Crissey Farm. Chang is a retired pediatrician who worked at Bayside Medical Center, Fairview Pediatrics, and Berkshire Health Systems over the course of her 40-year career, before retiring in May 2022.
Chang was born in Taiwan in 1956 and immigrated to America along with her family in 1965, when she was nine years old.
For the last seven years, Chang has served on the town’s Board of Health, and since 2022, she has served on the town’s Library Board of Trustees. She is also volunteers the Berkshire Botanical Garden, the Mason Public Library’s Children’s Library, and at Gideon Garden and works as a supervisor librarian for the Simon’s Rock Alumni Library.
According to the Rotary Club’s guidelines, the Citizen of the Year honoree:
- Must be a non-Rotarian;
- “The honoree’s achievements will have been such as to be of general benefit to the South Berkshire community, or of benefit to a larger community, and of such nature as to reflect credit on South County”; and
- “The beneficial achievements of the honoree will have been affected through his or her profession or business, through volunteer activities, through philanthropy or any combination of the foregoing.”
“As Rotarians, we recognize the virtue of service,” Rotary Club President Kelly Jones said at the event. “But we also know that we are not the sole proprietors of that trait. There are many outstanding individuals outside of the Rotary Club who devote much of their time and lives to serving their community. Thousands of volunteer hours [go] unrecognized [in the community]. Each year, the Citizen of the Year Award recognizes an individual in our area who exemplifies service above self, personally and professionally, a resident who has contributed significantly to improving the quality of life in the state, region, and or community.”
Jones said that the person that the club chooses for its Citizen of the Year is someone who “is truly inspiring and motivates us to do more for the community.”
Great Barrington Library Committee Chair Sharon Shaloo spoke highly of Chang before she accepted her award. “She was a beloved pediatrician in the community, and now she gives back as a civic volunteer,” Shaloo said. “I don’t think the choices of the boards of health and volunteerism with the libraries are surprising because Ruby believes that a healthy community, and a thriving community, is one that builds both bodies and minds, that ensures the fundamentals of public health, and also works to elevate and enrich each individual so our community thrives.”
“To me, Ruby is the ideal candidate for the Citizen of the Year,” Rotary Club member Bobbie Hallig told the audience. “She has always sought out ways to support the common good. Here, our mantra in Rotary is service above self. This mantra has been Ruby’s life and she has lived the Rotary’s mantra.”
Chang told the audience she was honored to accept the award. “I certainly am not the only one that has contributed to our community,” Chang said. “When I was practicing medicine, I looked at one child at a time; I looked at one baby’s eyes at a time; and I touched one person at a time. Now that I am retired, I realized there is a bigger calling for the general community where public health really matters, because public health can touch hundreds and thousands of people. Public health and its policies are really important and should be a tight fiber for our community. That is why I have been on the Board of Health for so many years to try to support that belief.”
Chang said that her support for the town’s library traces back to her childhood experiences. “As a child growing up in the backwoods in New Hampshire, in the summertime, my mother would tell me to leave the house and not to come back until it was dinner,” Chang said. “I had nowhere else to go but the library, which was my place to see the world. My mother and father spoke Chinese, and I did not know that much English. The library helped me navigate through much of middle school, and it was a source of information that I did not have in Taiwan. To me, the libraries spelled out freedom. It spelled out the need to discover for yourself the truth of what you want to know, and it’s so important in this fabric of our life with misinformation and not knowing where to go to find what’s right. I do my best to get support from the state and to get money from them in order to support the next generation, whether they are townspeople, immigrants, and people who don’t know English. We want to help support them and their livelihoods.”
