We talk with Fran Held, Founder of Mitzvah Circle Foundation, a Pennsylvania non-profit organization and Good People Fund grantee that provides donated and purchased goods like clothing, children’s books, toiletries, housewares and more to individuals and families in crisis.

She described some health challenges that she believes developed due to years of not-so-great eating habits, like drinking a couple of liters of soda every day and eating lots of fast food.

But she could easily host her own healthy eating show now if she wanted, fluent as she’s become in the terminology and practice of controlling portions, reading and interpreting nutrition and ingredient labels, and getting the best healthy bang for every food dollar she spends.

“I’ve come a long way and this program has been amazing and life changing for not only me, but for my family,” she said. “We are on the right path now.”

This 40-year-old mother of three, who lives in New York City’s East Harlem, is one of about a dozen adults who graduated this past spring from a 12-week program designed to examine their food stories and equip them with the knowledge, motivation and support to alter default behaviors and make better food choices.

The program is an initiative of FEAST (Food, Education, Access, Support, Together), a Los Angeles-based organization that not only advocates for food security for vulnerable populations, but also runs community-based wellness programs, like the one in East Harlem, to empower individuals and families, many of them low-income, to navigate what can be a confusing, defeating and fatal ecosystem of food and choice.

FEAST, formerly known as Groceryships, is a grantee of The Good People Fund, which has supported the expansion of the wellness program and outreach to New York City.

“This is a program that is changing lives and futures in a holistic way,” said Dana Rizer, FEAST’s executive director, who has a Master’s degree in Food Studies from New York University and co-authored the organization’s curriculum with FEAST founder, Sam Polk. “With Good People Fund support, we expect that our impact in New York will continue to grow.”

The graduation in East Harlem in the spring was one of three that took place in New York, along with one in Brooklyn and one in Queens that collectively recognized 30 participants.  At PS 112, where the program took place and where most of the participants have children attending school, some students celebrated with their parents.

One participant, a mother of two pre-teenage boys, said the program had done nothing less than enhance family dynamics and connection as she discusses food choices with her sons, goes food shopping with them, and makes eating together a more communal and regular affair.

“We are having conversations at home now about what we are eating and why we are eating it,” she said. “And we are sitting around the family table more now sharing food and stories, and my older son wants to even do some of the cooking now. It’s been transformative in ways I couldn’t have seen.”

To FEAST, that is, in fact, the entire point, recognizing that food can and should be a connector within families and communities, with the power to sustain, nourish and strengthen not just the person consuming it.

The challenges are enormous, Rizer said, as people’s food choices are so often mired in culture, income status, fads, body image, family history, and, especially in economically challenged areas, all-important access.

“Thanks to the success of food marketers and lobbyists, the overall system is set up so that people too often are misinformed, and fail to know how to make the right choices,” she said.

“We are trying to break through that, not only through education but also through a deliberate support system that allows participants to set goals and come back every week to report back, celebrate successes and troubleshoot problem areas. Taken together, it makes an enormous difference with numerous ancillary benefits.”

Tom Colicchio, the celebrity chef and restaurant owner, who has been an outspoken advocate in communities and on Capitol Hill for food justice issues and for the FEAST approach to food education, attended the East Harlem event to underscore his support for the grassroots work that is often necessary in economically challenged neighborhoods.

“FEAST is the missing link in just so many ways here and elsewhere,” he said. “We are two generations removed from the Depression, when our grandparents and great-grandparents cooked everything.  Now we are around fast food and convenience stores and no one knows how to find the proper food and cook it.

“But once you know how to cook, then you can stretch the dollar, know what healthy means, and make better choices and have an impact on yourself and your family and its health.  It’s a way to take control and take back a piece of your life. This program is making that happen.”

Graduates of the East Harlem program said they will remain a support group beyond FEAST, yet another trickle-down benefit from their months-long class.

“We have come together and supported each other through change,” said one. “There’s no telling what we can do to improve others’ lives too.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

While in DC, we stopped in to talk with change maker Abby Sondak, Founder of Just Imagine. With support from The Good People Fund, her organization is giving summer overnight camping experiences to disadvantaged inner-city youth and leveraging the moment to prepare them for success in college.

She described a journey through a darkness most know nothing about – that of a professional Jewish woman navigating the netherworld of prison life and later reemerging into society to reclaim her dignity and purpose.

Evie Litwok was at a New Jersey synagogue speaking at a social action Shabbat, and if her tale of a life bent to extremes by the criminal justice and penal systems created awareness through discomfort – and it did, judging alone from the air in the room – then she hit her mark.

“I am gifted with being articulate, and so I have to tell this story,” she said. “I need to use all my strength to make people aware and force change.”

That story is one of two decades fighting charges of white collar crime and culminating in two years in federal prisons – including a stint in solitary confinement. The experience introduced her all too intimately to social malignancies and human rights abuses festering and growing there, from homophobia to misogyny to racism and just about everything in between.

“I’ve never been physically or emotionally the same since then,” said Litwok. “I have no serenity anymore. I have no choice but to channel what I’ve seen and experienced into activism. I am a baby of the civil and women’s and gay rights movements, and I’ve never checked my activism, and I’m not going to now.”

The vessel of her impact is not only her own voice, but also the organization that she founded in 2015, Witness to Mass Incarceration (WMI). It is creating initiatives to raise public consciousness of conditions and abuses within the nation’s justice and penal systems and advocating for change.

The group is one of the Good People Fund’s newest grantees and received a matching grant to bolster its capacities, reach and effect.

Among WMI’s initiatives is a nascent but growing library of digital testimonies of formerly incarcerated individuals, giving a record of their experiences an archive and public platform. So far, about 25 people have sat for interviews.

The focus of the testimonies, and WMI in general, is on women and members of the LGBTQ community – individuals Litwok said are most vulnerable to abuses in the justice and penal systems and beyond.

“We must change the narrative from invisibility and victimization to empowerment through documentation, organizing and advocacy,” she said.  “Once someone sees the human faces of incarcerated people and hears stories, they will be more likely to support reform of a system that prioritizes punishment at every step.”

The group just this year launched a new initiative – The Suitcase Project – that seeks to ease the move to civilian life for those just released from prison and transitioning psychologically and physically to realities and demands that they are too often unprepared to face even within existing social services networks.

The project quite literally gives just-released people a suitcase with a laptop computer, a mobile phone with pre-paid minutes of usage, gift cards for groceries and clothing, and other essentials to help them build paths to productivity and self-worth.

The impetus for it came from Litwok’s own experience. She left prison in 2014, her resources depleted, her social support network nearly non-existent, and with scant prospects.

“Reentry is worse than prison,” she said. “Rarely is anyone waiting for you, rarely do you have housing, rarely do you have a community of support, or a job.

“I was given $30 and sent on a bus to Port Authority in New York. I was homeless and penniless for 16 months.  I understood poverty for the first time in my life.”

So far, two individuals leaving prison have received a suitcase, and a third will later this spring. Chasity, 33, began her journey back into society in January and said the Suitcase Project provides not only material support, but also represents and plants hope.

“It is just hard to re-enter with absolutely nothing,” she said, adding that she is starting undergraduate studies in criminal justice.  “So the suitcase opens doors to positivity and moving in the right direction as opposed to just being overwhelmed and feeling forgotten.”

The suitcase and its contents don’t come cheaply, and Litwok visits synagogues, like the one in New Jersey, to make the case for sponsorship of one, and in the process create a community of caring for those leaving prison and beginning new lives.

“The greatest thing we can do for each other in this life is to form and nourish community in all of its forms,” she said.

Speak with Litwok for any length of time and she will come to share the fact that her parents are survivors of the Holocaust, and that her closeness to that experience and her embrace of Jewish practice in prison informs and powers her passions and desire to make change.

“The Holocaust didn’t end for us in 1945,” she said. “It was a framework for me growing up, and how I see the world and the ‘other,’ and is simply part of who I am and a driving experience. If we really believe all that we say about ‘never again,’ then we can never allow those words to lose their meaning and value, and always be working to snuff out injustices and abuses so they don’t become the norm.

“I am up against the clock in my life at this point, and this is all that matters now. I don’t need to impress anyone for the rest of my life. I don’t care about making money. The driving Jewish values that we talk about don’t mean anything unless we make them mean something. I hope I’m doing that.”

By. H. Glenn Rosenkrantz

Today, Israel is home to more than 150,000 Ethiopians, with more than half living below the poverty line. In that number are many teenagers who were born in Ethiopia and made aliyah as infants and young children. For most, there is no understanding or recollection of their country of origin.

Dr. Stu Chesner, a noted psychologist who has lived in Israel for many years, understands the unique needs of young people, many of them Ethiopian, who struggle to fit in and began Magen, a new Good People Fund grantee, to provide a holistic approach to academic, emotional and social intelligence.

The Ethiopian kids in this picture arrived in Ethiopia today in search of their roots and to better understand their heritage. It was our honor to underwrite the trip for three of these young people. We can only imagine the insights they will gain from this journey “home” and how those insights will help them mature and become productive adults.