DONATE NOW
SUBSCRIBE

The Good People Fund

You are here: Home / Archives for News

Two Atlanta Nonprofits Receive Grants

by

Second Helpings Atlanta (SHA) and Creating Connected Communities (CCC), the host organization for Amy’s Holiday Party, are both the recent recipients of opening grants of nearly $10,000 from The Good People Fund (GPF). Their efforts focus on the power and teaching of social responsibility, teen philanthropy and an investment in tzedakah. GPF both discovers and supports small, effective tzedakah initiatives in the U.S. and Israel dedicated to tikkun olam that might otherwise fall below the radar screen of larger charities.

In 2004, SHA was founded by congregant Guenther Hecht as a social action project of Temple Sinai in Shady Springs. Today, several hundred volunteer families and individuals have rescued and distributed more than 3.5 million pounds of food.

Right down the road, CCC provides leadership training for teens to work with vulnerable children receiving services from Atlanta’s local agencies. As a capstone project, they plan and host Amy’s Holiday Party for more than 700 underprivileged children from the Greater Atlanta area. The grant will underwrite increased busing to bring additional children to CCC events as well as costs involved in their Spring event.

At the age of 12, Amy Sacks Zeide was devastated after watching a TV news report where someone had stolen all the presents from an Atlanta homeless shelter just before their annual holiday party, leaving the children with nothing. Amy then donated her time and the money she received from her Bat Mitzvah to throw a holiday party for the children at a local Atlanta shelter. She is now the Executive Director of CCC. Both Hecht and Zeide have instilled their Jewish values into the organizations they founded.

The deep rooted values that SHA and CCC promote are also shared by the mission of this micro philanthropy The Good People Fund, a true tzedakah initiative. In the coming months, Naomi Eisenberger, founding director of the Good People Fund, will visit the Atlanta area to catch up with Guenther and Amy.

Editor’s note: Rachel Litcofsky is the Public Relations Consultant for The Good People Fund. For more information about The Good People Fund, visit www.goodpeoplefund.org.

atlantajewishtimes.com/two-atlanta-nonprofits-receive-grants/

Shelter Music Boston Brings Classical Music to Homeless Shelters

by

A unique business model for social change is taking place in the Boston area. When they are not performing at venues such as Symphony Hall, a group of professional musicians have discovered a way to support themselves financially and take part in an innovative social service. Since 2010, Shelter Music Boston has been bringing their classical chamber music to residents at homeless and wellness shelters.

Three full-time members of the group make up the core of Shelter Music Boston, with a few musicians who play on occasion. Violinist Julie Leven, the executive and artistic director, started the organization four years ago due to a lack of musical jobs at the time. She was working on an organic farm with Rebecca Strauss, a violist and violinist in the group, when the two began discussing the state of their musical careers.

“We started talking about the fact that there was not much work in the freelance classical music world,” Strauss said. “There were so many financial cutbacks that musicians were losing work left and right, and I was most definitely one of them.”

It was on a frigid winter day in December 2009 when Leven read a newspaper article about a woman in New York City playing music in homeless shelters. “That’s it! We need that in Boston. I am going to make that happen,” she said. Leven amassed a group of musicians and then contacted Elizabeth Condron, who was working at the Pine Street Inn Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain at the time.

“The very first time we went, I was a little bit nervous and didn’t know how we would be received, and neither did anyone else, including the people who worked there,” said Shelter Music Boston violinist Julia McKenzie.

Now, four years later, the group is playing at seven homeless and wellness shelters, including Crittenton Women’s Union, Dimock Center, Caspar Emergency Shelter, Community Day Center Waltham, and Pine Street Inn’s Men’s Inn, Women’s Inn, and Shattuck Shelter.

At Dimock Center in Roxbury, in a program supporting women post-detox, I witnessed two worlds colliding. The center has a large and tranquil campus of castle-esque late 19th-century buildings. It sits atop a hill, overlooking the lives that these women once lived, and in the distance toward the horizon, the lives that they are soon to lead.

Shelter Music Boston’s performance was not like going to a classical concert at a traditional venue where you sit in your seat and clap at the end. It was highly interactive and a learning experience for those at the center. Pausing in between each musical piece, the musicians allot time to discuss the many different composers or inform the residents about their instruments. The audience asked questions and shared their own thoughts and feelings.

“The point of our shelter concerts is not just the performance,” Leven said. “The performance is the starting point for the interaction, the education, the community building, and creating a respectful environment for people to feel more human.”

Along with the audience involvement, the musicians’ dedication to the shelter residents is also integral to their effectiveness. Strauss explained, “The residents who are in the shelter for multiple months, or sometimes years, know us. Stability and consistency are important so that they know there are people in this world who care enough to come back every single month.”

The Pine Street Men’s and Women’s Inns in the South End of Boston hosts crowds of homeless men and women. The two shelters sit side by side and are surrounded by renovated restaurants and brownstones. The exterior of the shelters put on the façade of old brick factories, while the interior resembles a typical high school. The walls in the hallways are lined with lockers, the cafeteria is large, and the residents congregate in groups, chatting like high school students in between class periods.

Shelter Music Boston performs in the cafeteria, and the concerts, similar to those at Dimock Center, include plenty of audience participation. One man during a concert transcended the barriers of appropriate etiquette for a classical performance. He yelled things like, “This is hot!” and “I’ve never heard anything like this—this is cool!”

“He was responding, and no one has ever told him it was wrong, that you don’t yell at a classical concert. It was fine that he did that. It was cool for me as a performer. In jazz they clap all the time, and in rock and roll they’re screaming, so what’s wrong with this?” Ms. Leven reflected. “Afterward he came up to me and said very quietly, ‘You gave me back my heart and soul.’ I will never forget this man. This is why I became a musician. For this moment, this one guy.”

While Shelter Music Boston performances are for residents only, the organization will hold a concert that is open to the public on October 5. Anyone interested can contact Shelter Music Boston for more information.

Shelter Music Boston Brings Classical Music to Homeless Shelters

One Book at a Time Expands its Reach

by

Family-to-Family’s One Book at a Time program, in partnership with the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, has expanded to 19 communities in 13 states, and continues to grow. One Book at a Time matches donors to children in need, helping them build their own home library. “We’re really amazed at the daily requests we get from donors from all over the U.S. to sponsor a child,” said Pam Koner, executive director of Family-to-Family. “We are working with Boys & Girls Clubs across the county, YMCAs and schools, and we hope to be in all 50 states by the end of the year,” Koner added.

As part of the expansion, OBAAT is exploring the idea of bringing on a children’s book author as a spokesperson, and is in talks with publishers about a possible “featured publisher of the month.” The featured publisher would recommend books for donors to consider under the OBAAT program and link back to indie booksellers to promote independent bookstores in the process.

The latest states to sign on to the program include New Jersey, Massachusetts, Missouri, Maine, Maryland, and Alabama, as well as additional sites in New York and California.

Classical music brings it home for those living in Boston-area shelters

by

Julie Leven takes classical music to a place where it has never gone before in Boston: homeless shelters.

Leven, who is Jewish and lives in Arlington, plays the violin with the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra and tours with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra. But although she has performed with the Jerusalem Symphony and the Aarhus Symfonieorkester in Denmark, and in music festivals all over the world, she believes that classical music not only belongs in gilded concert halls, but also has the capacity to thrive in the unlikeliest of places.

That simple idea inspired Leven to launch Shelter Music Boston, a nonprofit organization that brings professionally trained classical musicians to homeless shelters in the Boston area. The organization, which began four years ago after Leven read a news story about a similar nonprofit in New York City, now works with seven area shelters including the Pine Street Inn Shattuck Shelter in Boston, the Community Day Center of Waltham and others. The musicians play concerts at each of the seven shelters once a month. After one of her performances at a homeless shelter, a woman came up to Leven and said the music felt like “water for my soul when I was thirsty.” After another concert, two men got into a friendly argument about which composer was better: Beethoven or Dvorak. Just a short while before, these men “did not know they could talk about music with each other,” Leven noted. But her concerts brought them and many others together.

In an interview with The Jewish Advocate, Leven said no one should be excluded from classical music. She believes access to music is just as important for survival as food and a roof over one’s head, and works in concert with the work done by psychiatrists and social workers at the shelters. She said it gives people without a permanent home a sense of dignity. Many audience members tell her that at the end of a difficult day on the streets, coming to a shelter and listening to classical music has an uplifting and calming effect.

One of the unique features of Leven’s nonprofit is that the musicians, who mainly perform in duos and trios, receive pay for their work in the shelters – which, Leven explained, encourages them to be more committed to their relationship with Shelter Music Boston. And in order to be able to pay the musicians, Leven raises money for her organization.

Shelter Music Boston, since its conception, has raised about $100,000 from various philanthropies and individual donors. This fiscal year, Leven’s budget is $75,000. A significant portion of that funding comes from the Good People Fund, a philanthropic organization run by Naomi Eisenberger out of her home in Millburn, N.J.

The Good People Fund, which provides financial support to about 65 to 70 organizations in the United States and Israel, was founded on the Jewish principles of tzedakah and Tikkun Olam. In the course of six years, Eisenberger has raised more than $6 million, which went toward charities that alleviate poverty, hunger, disability, mental illness, trauma, social isolation, and other societal and personal ills.

In order to qualify for a grant from the Good People Fund – which, in addition to funding, also supports nonprofits with guidance and mentoring – an organization must have a budget less than $500,000. But most importantly, “There has to be the presence of a good person or good people; there’s got to be an individual who is responding to something – either something personal in their own life or something in this world that they feel passionately about and feel they need to change,” said Eisenberger. “It’s the story of the individual that guides us – that’s the first piece.” The Good People Fund’s donors, the majority of whom are Jewish, range from family foundations that give hundreds of thousands of dollars, to individuals who contribute one dollar a month, to Hebrew school students who send their tzedakah money to the fund.

The Good People Fund supports some of the nonprofits in the United States that are not oriented toward specifically Jewish causes, such as Shelter Music Boston. Eisenberger met Leven through Root Cause, a Massachusetts-based organization that serves as an incubator for nonprofits. After a 15-minute conversation with Leven, Eisenberger said, “This is a no-brainer for us. It’s such a creative and unusual program. [Leven] could have been a poster child for the Good People Fund.”

Leven, who has a strong connection to the Jewish principles of charity and social justice, said the work done by the Good People Fund resonated with her. With the grant from the fund, Leven’s organization was able to begin performing at two new shelters.

And Eisenberger, who attended a recent Shelter Music Boston concert, said, “It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”

She added,“I cannot imagine what it would be like to report to a shelter every night in order to have a place to sleep. It was a moving experience and I came away even more pleased that we had decided to work with [Shelter Music Boston] and help them grow.”

Visit sheltermusicboston.org and goodpeoplefund.org for more information.

jewishadvocate.boston

 

Good People Fund

by

Mission:
To respond to problems such as poverty, disability, trauma, and social isolation in the United States and Israel.

About the Organization:
Inspired by the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), the Good People Fund responds to a range of urgent problems, including poverty, disability, trauma, and social isolation, by providing financial support and management guidance to innovative grassroots organizations.

Current Programs:
The organization’s grantmaking program supports U.S.- and Israel-based nonprofits with annual budgets under $500,000 and no professional development staff working in the areas of aging, education, food insecurity, poverty, health, and women’s empowerment. Grants awarded in 2013 ranged in amount from $1,000 to $85,154. The organization also works to connect donors with nonprofits whose work best realizes their personal tzedakah goals.

Web Site:
Visitors to the site can browse the organization’s blog as well as videos featuring grantees, sign up for the Good People Fund e-newsletter, or make a donation. Visitors also can learn abouttzedakah and browse suggestions for tzedakah activities for students, families, and educators.

Funding:
The Good People Fund is supported by individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Address:

384 Wyoming Avenue
Millburn, NJ 07041
Phone: (973) 761-0580
ORGANIZATION: GOOD PEOPLE FUND
LOCATION: ISRAEL; NATIONAL; NEW JERSEY
http://www.philanthropynewsdigest.org/npo-spotlight/good-people-fund

Student shares journey of survival at Northwestern University

by

A man who escaped Darfur as a teenager spoke to students at Northwestern University. Below is the release:

Guy Josif escaped the destruction of Darfur as a teenager. Staying in refugee camps en route he ultimately made his way to Israel. Last night at Northwestern University he shared the moving and powerful story of his journey from genocide in Darfur to freedom in Israel and now the U.S., where Guy is currently a college student in Chicago and has filed papers seeking political asylum here.

To a crowd of students and community members, Guy presented his story with a purpose, to educate others about the oppression of his people, and the problems that still exist in Darfur today.  The program was an effort co-sponsored and organized by NU Hillel, Challah for Hunger and NUCHR.

Guy was introduced to the event organizers through his connection with the Good People Fund (www.goodpeoplefund.org), a US organization which provides financial support, guidance, and mentoring to charitable activities of modest proportions that are undertaken by Good People acting singly or in small groups.  The Fund has helped to underwrite Guy’s education in the US. Guy is currently studying at Lake County College outside of Chicago and plans to continue his education and go on to one day study law and international relations.

http://evanston.suntimes.com/2014/05/29/student-shares-journey-survival-northwestern-university/