SOS Sink or Swim, the local nonprofit dedicated to teaching children how to swim and be safe in the water, has elected Marianne Spiegel to its Executive Council and Dr. Sherry Manning as a founding member emerita.
Marianne Spiegel, a resident of St. Michaels, Md., and McLean, Va., joins SOS with a long-time love of sailing and swimming. Professionally, she has served on the staffs of Senators Hubert Humphrey and Dick Clark, Congressmen Bill Gray and Howard L. Berman, and for the U.S. State Department's policy planning staff. In that time, Spiegel worked on sanctions to end apartheid in South Africa and white minority rule in Rhodesia, and also to end U.S. shipments of helicopters and nerve gas components to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. She also worked for disaster relief and recovery programs in the African Sahel and on restructuring U.S. aid throughout the world to reach subsistence farmers.
Dr. Sherry Manning helped start SOS Sink or Swim in 2014, when the organization was founded under the auspices of the Miles River Yacht Club Foundation. She is a former college president; the founder, CEO, and Chair, retired, of ECCI, one of the largest telecommunications firms serving colleges, universities, and independent schools in America; and a member of the Board of Trustees of McDaniel College.
Manning and her husband, Charles, are involved with residential, commercial, and hospitality real estate investments, including the Hambleton Inn in St. Michaels, Md. They are the parents of three grown children and the grandparents of six, all swimmers. She will be assisting the SOS Executive Council in establishing an endowment to ensure that future generations of children on the Eastern Shore will continue to have the opportunity to learn to swim.
SOS’s 2018 swim season is now underway, with lessons going on at both the Bay Hundred Community Pool in St. Michaels and the George Murphy Community Pool in Easton. Since its founding, more than 2,700 area children have received free swimming lessons thanks to generous support of the SOS program. The program is docked at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, with CBMM serving as its fiscal sponsor, and administered by the Department of Talbot County Parks & Recreation.
To learn more, or to donate to SOS, visit sossinkorswim.org or send a check to: SOS Sink or Swim, 606A N. Talbot Street, Ste 109, St. Michaels, MD 21663.