Courtney Smith was out of college and living with housemates in Detroit when the doorbell rang. Her brother, six years younger, was homeless and without resources and needed help.

She took him in, at least for the interim. But soon, a handful of his friends from the street – all in similar circumstances – were camped out on air mattresses strewn throughout the basement.

The situation was all too disturbingly and shockingly familiar. Courtney herself had grown up in the foster care system, and was adopted into a family, but left at age 15 due to family conflict and ended up couch surfing, doubling up, and living in shelters. And even in college, she faced housing insecurity.

“Homelessness is very personal to me,” she said. “It can be a cyclical issue that goes on for generations if we don’t do something about it.”

And so she set out to do so, starting on a determined path that led to the founding in 2016 of Detroit Phoenix Center (DPC), the city’s first-ever drop-in center for street-connected youth. DPC is a new grantee organization of The Good People Fund.

The organization offers various low-barrier portals into a safe space for teens and young adults who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness. There, they can access basics that can mean survival – from showers, meals, laundry services, lockers, day beds, and other needs, to career and life skills workshops, computer labs, housing crisis support … and a community of care and concern.

Pre-pandemic, DPC reached and engaged about 150 teens and young adults each year. But for the very fact that there is simply no other such place in Detroit – one designed with a holistic approach to help them with immediate and daily needs, and also to disrupt predictable and unwelcome trajectories – many may have disappeared into the environment with no trace or hope.

As COVID-19 has resulted in increasingly restricted access to DPC, and quite literally exposed a severely vulnerable population to illness and death, the organization has taken to the streets. It is finding street-connected youth where they congregate and live to bring them mobile- and virtual-supported help, assistance and counsel – ranging from basics like face masks and hand sanitizer, to healthy food and housing vouchers.

“Many don’t have anywhere to go to shelter in place,” Courtney said. “Many don’t have access to running water and soap to wash their hands for 20 seconds. Many are living in abandoned buildings in groups of ten or more, and transmission is an issue.

“We’ve had to change our whole service provision during this time and be innovative. They are very high risk and vulnerable during a pandemic. We have to be out there.”

At the heart of DPC is Courtney’s recognition that it would be nothing if not informed by the youth that it attracts and serves. In fact, she labels herself a “servant leader.”

“The work we do is truly driven by heart and humility and selflessness,” she said. “There is no ego here. The youth are the ones who have to be centered and elevated. Their lived experiences form the fabric of DPC, and intentionality in putting their voices first is key to allowing them to be served effectively.”

In fact, DPC has a “Youth Action Board” that provides leadership and personal development for members who have direct experience with homelessness and other adverse societal conditions as they give input into DPC programming, services and reach, and advocate for positive systemic change.

Ask Courtney what’s at the heart of her passion and commitment to uplift and help vulnerable youth in Detroit, and she speaks about that “lived experience.” It’s a term that comes up frequently in conversation with her, framing as it does a worldview of not only challenges, but also solutions.

It took on even deeper significance and meaning when her brother, Blair – who knocked on her door at a moment of need just a few short years earlier – died by suicide at the age of 19. It was on the eve of the opening of DPC, which he’d helped to envision and design, and where he was voted by peers as first president of the Youth Action Board.

“There is a pain point for me in this work,” Courtney said. “Those can either cripple us or force us to show up in the world as the best versions of ourselves. I chose the latter.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

If you’re looking for Larry Oleinick on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, just spot the blue Chrysler Pacifica that’s parked in Hart Plaza in central Detroit.

It’s there that he and a small contingent of co-workers set up an oasis, of sorts, for dozens of people who are homeless or experiencing severe hardship.

Here, they find outstretched hands holding sandwiches and snacks, a cup of coffee, a needed new hoodie or pair of socks, and any number of other life-sustaining essentials.

But perhaps most importantly, they find a community. Because it’s in Hart Plaza, by the van, that they are known by their names, and they feel counted, and that means everything in a world that often shuns them or renders them invisible.

“The greatest gift we can give to people is letting them know they are not alone,” said Larry. “We do that by showing up.”

Larry founded Heart 2 Hart Detroit – a new grantee organization of The Good People Fund – in 2012, after a career in the dental supply business. Talk to him for any length of time, and it becomes clear how and why he landed in this place.

It was during his teenage and young adult years, after all, that his parents organized an extended-family project each Passover, setting up card tables in their suburban Detroit home and putting everyone on an assembly line to pack boxes full of matzo, candies, and other holiday items.

When that was done, everyone got a mapped-out route to deliver the boxes to those in need, including people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

“I was fortunate enough to have parents who wanted to get involved and help people,” Larry said. “They modeled this for me and it rubbed off. Kindness doesn’t just fall out of the sky, you have to make it happen.”

The turning point came for him one hot summer Tuesday off from work, when he decided in the moment to take a cooler on wheels and some simple snacks to downtown Detroit and see who he could help.

“I realized the comfort I could give by handing a bottle of water and a bag of chips and a minute or two of conversation to people with virtually nothing,” he said.  “Many of them had had one bad break and didn’t make it back and their lives went spiraling down. That could happen to any of us.

“I’d been thinking about it for years. I wanted to get out of the business world and do something to help people all the time. So I took the leap. You don’t need a degree for this. Just a heart.”

Heart 2 Hart Detroit was born and established very shortly after that. With monetary and in-kind donations, it reaches about 100 people every day out in the field, and has grown to the extent that in 2019 alone, it distributed over 14,000 lunches, 140 winter coats, 6,100 hygiene product items, 5,500 pairs of socks, and the list goes on. And, all from that blue Pacifica van parked in Hart Plaza and now other locations in the city as well, like parks, shelters, and largely abandoned streets.

The organization is firmly rooted in the belief that interactions with those it helps are not merely transactional. Indeed, its success and deep impact is fueled by trust formed between those it helps, and Heart 2 Hart Detroit’s staff and corps of volunteers.

“If you give people consistency and honesty and a smile, that goes a long way to build a relationship and grow friendship,” Larry said. “We go way beyond food and clothing, to honoring them with integrity as individuals, and finding out what is going on and how we might be able to somehow help.”

In fact, Heart 2 Heart Detroit has connected those it serves to community service organizations, rehab facilities, estranged family members, and even to potential employees. Larry freely gives his phone number to those he meets on the streets, a literal lifeline for some.

With the coronavirus pandemic affecting interactions and patterns nearly universally, Larry and his team are adjusting, but a level of intimacy has been lost, for now at least.

“There is now by necessity a lot of physical space between us and there are aspects that get lost when you can’t hug someone or talk too closely. There is a confidence and a trust that is lost. We make sure they are getting everything they need, of course, but it is a challenge. Hopefully we can make up for all that is lost soon enough.”

In the meantime, that blue Pacifica, with Larry at the wheel, will be there, as everyone who relies on it expects it to be. “Nothing will stop us,” Larry said.

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

“El Paso Strong.”

Those words on digital traffic boards along I-10 in this Texas city bordering Mexico couldn’t mask a pervasive sense of sorrow.

The day before, 22 people of Hispanic origin were murdered, and 24 seriously wounded, while shopping in a Walmart. The shooter, a white nationalist racist, traveled over 500 miles and hunted down Hispanic people like prey in the store aisles.

Just over 24 hours later, thousands of Texans held a solemn vigil at a sports field located near the crime scene. They heard speeches of solidarity from leaders, including rabbis, priests, imams and ministers.

Local politicians spoke against hatred and about El Paso’s reputation as among the nation’s safest of cities.

A Hispanic woman identifying herself as only Theresa shouted, “This is our Kristallnacht, this is our Holocaust,” and said her mother was a Crypto Jew from the Dominican Republic. Theresa said she had taught courses in Holocaust education in El Paso’s public schools.

“This is just so painful,” she said. “It closely resembles what I believe happened to the Jewish people during the 1930s.”

A day later, we met another Hispanic woman who knew all too personally the pain of gun crime.

Lupita, a grandmother of three, entered the US at El Paso from Juarez, Mexico. She arrived with the children after her son was gunned down in a Juarez bar. Her daughter was also killed by gunfire in the same city. A third son, who entered the US in El Paso, is being detained in a federal camp in Louisiana pending his asylum application.

The children were separated from her at the border, taken to New York, where they stayed until finally being returned to a small, run-down, largely Hispanic El Paso suburb.

Rabbi Steven Bayar, JSurge Executive Director, and journalist Phil Jacobs met Lupita as well as many others impacted on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Their trip, in cooperation with The Good People Fund, focuses on bearing witness to the struggle migrants face leaving untenable situations in their home nations with the hope of settling in the States.

Rabbi Bayar and Jacobs went from homeless shelters to meetings with El Paso community activists deeply involved in the migrant conundrum.

At a visit to the Familias Triunfadoras community center, Bayar and Jacobs met the facility’s founder and director, Maria Covernali. She was converting an old adobe style post office into a place for computer education training, a play area for children and a family counseling center.

This is where Lupita showed up one recent day, looking for work and a purpose. For $30 a day, Ms. Covernali hired her to help with clean-up chores. Lupita and her recently arrived grandchildren are living in a nearby church for free.

“I had to leave Mexico,” she told JSurge. “I left everything behind, everything I had, including my house. It just wasn’t safe anymore. My son said that we will be okay here.”

But she added that when the immigration officials separated her from her grandchildren, she was heart broken.

On this day, with contributions from The Good People Fund, those same three children, two boys and a girl, received brand new, complete sets of clothing. The children will attend area schools.

Lupita will continue to work at the community center … and await the status of a humanitarian asylum acceptance to the US, which could take months.

For now, though, she said, “It feels good to smile.”

By Phil Jacobs

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

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