Grantee Ruth Moore is making an impact for survivors of sexual assault in the military. Her story was the focus of an article in All You magazine’s November issue.
Grantees in the News
Denver native reaches out through fitness
A psychology major with background as a personal trainer, athletic instructor and support counselor for disabled adults,Jared Ciner channeled these passions into the Spirit Club Foundation with an eye toward creating and opening up
health and fitness opportunities for people with disabilities. Founded in April 2013, the Spirit Club offers group and individual exercise and socially inclusive programming that teach its participants to adopt healthy and active lifestyles.
Ciner was recently introduced to the Good People Fund (GPF) and received an opening grant of $5,000 to support his efforts. GPF is an organization rooted in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and offers financial support and mentorship to small, effective initiatives in Israel and the US.
Ciner grew up in Denver where he attended Jewish day school,was actively involved with the Denver JCC and spent a year studying and volunteering in Israel. He credits his parents’ deep connection to Judaism and their encouragement of Jewish practice and values as having had a huge impact on his life today. His father, Denverite Sheldon Ciner,DDS, is a mohel.
The summer after college, Jared Ciner spent one month in Ethiopia volunteering at a school for children from severely impoverished backgrounds. While there, he organized sports and exercise activities for them. The experience inspired Ciner to pursue a profession that would include fitness for underserved populations. After receiving a BA in psychology from the University of Maryland and certification as a personal trainer, he began working as a support counselor for people with developmental disabilities.
Within one year created the Spirit Club. He now lives in Bethesda, Md. “After speaking to Jared we knew that his unique focus on this type of service for people with disabilities was something we wanted to be part of,” says Naomi Eisenberger, founder and executive director of GPF. Eisenberger had just returned from a visit with Ciner and Spirit Club members. “We support Jared and Spirit Club’s successful efforts to bring access to fitness and overall well being to this often overlooked community.”
Spirit Club members attend hour-long classes each week instructed by at least two certified personal trainers. The classes open with interactive themed exercises that give each member a chance to introduce himself or herself. The activities incorporate different types of fitness equipment, such as medicine balls, resistance bands, stability balls and agility ladders. All members are provided with portfolios to track their progress throughout the week. The classes conclude with a review of home health assignments, healthy snacks and time to socialize and consult with the personal trainers. Spirit Club’s co-founder, Sam Smith, a proud man with autism, is also a certified strength and conditioning specialist. Smith’s goal is to motivate others with his passion and enthusiasm for health and fitness.
Ciner says,“We are excited to now be part of the Good People Fund’s circle of grantees. “The demand for our services continues to increase and this assistance will enable us to offer fitness and health programming to people with disabilities throughout Maryland.”
Information: news@goodpeoplefund.org, www.spirit-club.org
With nonprofit, Max Levitt connects donors with sports programs in need
A dozen drawings lined the wall next to Max Levitt’s lofted bed in his Syracuse fraternity house.
They came from 12 kids at a small school near the Singita Game Reserve in eastern South Africa that his family visited on vacation. Levitt, a Rockville native, said he had delivered two duffel bags of sporting equipment to the children, whose lone activity before then was chasing one another around the hot blacktop barefoot.
It became the first of many donations for Levitt, who five years later runs a nonprofit that distributes sporting equipment to underprivileged kids in the Washington and Baltimore areas. Levitt believes his organization, Leveling the Playing Field Inc., is the largest multisport equipment donation business in the country.
While the 2010 vacation wasn’t designed as a community service trip, Levitt knew the surrounding villages could use the help. So he reached out to about six high school friends the summer before his senior year at Syracuse to gather as much sporting equipment as he could take on the flight.
“The impact it had on that school and those teachers and those kids was insane,” Levitt said. “Just like how excited they were and how shocked they were to get this stuff. It was so simple to have done for me.”
He had considered working as a sports agent or in public relations, but the expressions on the kids’ faces in the small African village made him reconsider.
“That’s when I first kind of started thinking … ‘maybe this [is] the road I want to go to in sports,'” Levitt said. “I can have security. I can be my own boss. I can do good things for the community. A lot of people focus on the negative in sports, but I can shift the focus to the positive.”
Levitt has watched his idea blossom — the nonprofit has distributed more than $900,000 of equipment to programs in the area since November 2012.
As Levitt sat at his desk as a sales associate at LivingSocial in late May 2013, his cellphone started to ring. He sneaked away to the stairwell, which had become his secondary office, to answer a call that gave him the push he needed to go all in.
On the other end was D.C. United, which had found Levitt online and wanted to do a collection drive with him at a game. At the time, Levitt had been working in sales for about two years, operating Leveling the Playing Field on the side.
“I was like, ‘Wow, I’m not even doing this full time, and it’s grown to the point where a professional soccer team has found me organically and wants to do a collection,'” Levitt said. “It was at that moment when I decided I was doing this full time. I could see that this was going to work.”
He put in his two weeks’ notice at LivingSocial shortly after that phone conversation.
It was a welcome reprieve for Levitt, who had been racing home to his parents’ basement — from which he operated the one-man company — from Chinatown at 5:30 p.m. each day, only to stay up until midnight making spreadsheets, sending emails and calling universities that might become donors and organizations looking for equipment.
“No one was listening to me,” Levitt said. “I hadn’t made any donations. I didn’t have a warehouse. I didn’t have a very good website. There wasn’t a lot to Leveling the Playing Field at that point. It was really still an idea. There was no proof of concept.”
So he invested $5,000 from his savings, using some of the money to buy a dozen plastic bins from Target to set up collections. He designed a website, too. And while he called it “one of the worst websites I’ve ever seen,” it was functional.
He turned his focus from colleges to the local area, calling churches, synagogues, community centers, swimming pools and schools. The bins he set up in the community began to fill up — cluttering his parents’ basement.
“We looked like a Goodwill agency,” said Kay Klass, Levitt’s mother. “We nagged him hard, but he kind of humored us through it. I was very happy when he was out on his own. Not just for myself and being able to see the floor again, but really just that he had a little more organization.”
To this day, people still stop by their driveway — even though Levitt has moved out — to drop off equipment they want to donate. About a year ago, Under Armour showed up at his parents’ house, and Klass answered the door.
They said they had some unsold equipment they were supposed to drop off. She told them Levitt had a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Silver Spring now, but they could put it in the garage for him to come pick up. The worker then turned and pointed to the semi-truck outside. It wouldn’t fit, they said.
‘Can’t imagine anything better’
With the back of a U-Haul filled to the brim with sports equipment June 9, Levitt drove to Baltimore. About a year earlier, he had made his first big donations in the city, dropping off about $50,000 worth of baseball equipment to James Mosher and Hamilton, two youth baseball leagues.
Levitt said Baltimore was an “obvious expansion.” He said more kids are in need of sporting equipment here, where 86 percent of city students received free or reduced lunch in 2014, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Center.
Levitt, who hopes to eventually franchise his business model to reach more cities, estimated he travels to Baltimore once a week, sometimes for meetings with potential clients and other days for drop-offs. And because renting a U-Haul for the 45-minute drive gets expensive — he said it averages about $300 a trip with gas — he tries to plan at least four drop-offs per visit.
The first stop on his June 9 trip was Randallstown High School, where athletic director Michael Gelman said he has about $6 to spend per athlete. With football helmets and pads costing more than $100, it isn’t feasible to provide equipment for students on all the school’s teams.
So, when he got an email about Levitt and what he had to offer, Gelman reached out to Levitt within 30 seconds. About two months later, Levitt was carrying bags filled with basketballs, soccer balls and lacrosse sticks, among other equipment, into a storage room at the school.
“This will open up the eyes of the coaches and the kids,” Gelman said. “This is phenomenal. This a blessing. I don’t know what to say. It will offer us opportunities we haven’t had in the past.”
After making a stop at the Parks and People’s storage unit to receive equipment from sports director David Johnson, who had received equipment from Leveling the Playing Field in the past, Levitt drove to the Druid Hill YMCA. Archie Cumberbatch Sr., a coordinator at the organization, had sent Levitt a wish list, but did not get his hopes up.
Then Levitt arrived with a truck full of equipment.
“I’ve been here for 6 1/2 years, nobody ever donated equipment to us, not like that,” Cumberbatch said. “Maybe an item here or an item there, but not a quantity that we had today.”
Cumberbatch said the YMCA has sometimes had to invent games because of its lack of equipment. That won’t be needed anymore.
“You have individuals that want to create an opportunity for the kids but don’t have the funding or the infrastructure to set something up,” Johnson said. “And then what Leveling the Playing Field does is it kind of eliminates the hurdle of trying to get equipment or uniforms or those little things that may just be the only thing that’s keeping you from really starting a successful program and really impacting the community.”
Levitt said it’s rewarding to hear from a child’s parent or coach, who better understand the long-term positive effect sports can have.
“If you are grinding out there to put dinner on the table and you can’t give your kid something as simple as a glove and a ball, that can’t be a great feeling as a parent,” Levitt said. “So seeing how grateful they are to give their kids that opportunity, for me, is almost more gratifying than seeing the kid’s expression.”
But he’ll never forget those drawings that lined his bedroom wall.
twitter.com/RyanBaillargeon
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/outdoors/bs-sp-leveling-the-playing-field-1004-20151001-story.html
Making better lives, a few dollars at a time
In the Israeli port city of Ashdod, two families with blind babies were eager to take courses at the country’s sole training center for parents of vision-impaired infants. But the center is in Petah Tikva, a three-bus journey from Ashdod, and these families did not have cars. How could they get the specialized guidance they needed?
Their municipal social worker appealed to a new nonprofit, Ten Gav, a crowdfunding site for relatively small needs identified by Israeli social workers and vetted by the two volunteer founders. Following a successful campaign, a van was hired to transport the families to and from the training sessions.
The funding needs presented on Ten Gav never exceed $1,500 (₪5,000), and every dollar donated goes directly to the chosen campaign, so even a small contribution counts large. Since December 2014, Ten Gav has fully funded 80 projects, among them a refrigerator for a destitute family; beds for new immigrants; an air-conditioner for the bedroom of a child with cerebral palsy and a washing machine for an elderly woman.
The founders, Ra’anana residents Vivi Mann and Naomi Brounstein, are professional women with a soft spot for charitable endeavors. They wanted to find a worthwhile project they could start and run together. Mann is a management consultant and Brounstein has degrees in law and social work.
“Ten Gav is all about empowering donors to select the cases their money will go to, and empowering the recipient.”
“Vivi and I looked for challenges that needed to be faced, and we developed this model for the Israeli market based on similar sites operating in America,” Brounstein tells ISRAEL21c.
They began Ten Gav as an online crowdfunding platform to match donors with modest needs in Israel that cannot be funded by the state or existing charities. “We are very careful not to present stories where another organization can easily provide what is needed,” says Brounstein.
With startup capital from supporters including Joseph Gitler, founder and head of the Leket Israel national food bank, they began making contact with municipal social workers across Israel.
They weren’t quite ready to launch when the 2014 summer conflict with Hamas escalated into Operation Protective Edge. But a Canadian friend of Brounstein’s wanted to make an immediate donation to families affected by the rocket fire, and asked if she could do so through Ten Gav.
“So we built our first site using Wix as Vivi ran around to communities in the South to find needs from social workers,” says Brounstein. “Sderot social workers deal with a lot of elderly residents, and we filled a number of requests for air conditioners and washing machines. This was not a directly war-related need, but in times of uncertainty and insecurity, any help you give goes a long way in making people feel they are supported by others.”
Seeing things others don’t
After the ceasefire in late August, the women took Ten Gav offline until they truly felt ready to launch at the end of the year.
“Ten Gav is all about empowering donors to select the cases their money will go to, and empowering the recipient,” says Mann.
Many of the causes brought to their attention by social workers don’t fall under the rubric of traditional charity. For example, a social worker in one city thought that joining an afterschool soccer program would help two boys in therapy to release their aggression in a fun and disciplined manner, and that they would benefit from being part of a team. Since their parents could not afford the fee, Ten Gav raised it and the boys were able to join.
The two founders say they are impressed by the sensitivity and creativity of the welfare authorities they meet in each municipality. “They see things in homes that you and I do not see,” says Brounstein.
Sharon Friedman, a social worker in the Department of Youth at Risk of Jerusalem, describes Ten Gav’s assistance as “oxygen to breathe” for some of her clients. Among requests her office has submitted and that have been successfully crowdfunded are piano lessons for a girl whose family could not afford them, a ping-pong table for a child with social difficulties, an afterschool program for a child from a single-parent home, and a computer to enable a woman to work from home.
Checks are made out to the service providers and handed over by the social workers. All administrative costs are covered separately by grants from supporters such as the US-based Good People Fund.
“We are looking to expand slowly so we can control the types of cases and level of due diligence we can do so our donors can always be confident their money is going to the right place,” says Brounstein.
Mann explains that the name “Ten Gav” was chosen for a few reasons. The expression loosely translates to “watch my back” and portrays the idea of helping out rather than handing over cash. “Everybody gives something and gets connected to a personal story, knowing their money won’t get lost in a big pool.”
For more information, click here.
How troubled teens become goodwill envoys
Stav was hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble. And then he joined a neighborhood club, Sayeret Chesed Yechudit (SAHI) – in English, the Special Grace Unit – which empowers disenfranchised Israeli teens by turning them into anonymous goodwill ambassadors.
Through SAHI and its founders, Avraham Hayon and Oded Weiss, Stav became attuned to people in need and how to help them discreetly.
When Stav noticed a boy out in winter in short sleeves, he called Hayon for guidance. Hayon said, “Get his size.” Stav introduced himself and invited the boy to play soccer. Purposely throwing the game, he embraced the boy in a victory hug, surreptitiously noting the size on the tag inside his thin shirt. The next day, Stav left four coats at the boy’s door.
“My mom thinks that ever since I started going to SAHI, I’ve become more mature and I know what it means to give. I’ve started taking my life in my own hands,” says Stav in a video about the work of this voluntary organization, which started with seven teens in Kiryat Gat and now encompasses 400 teenagers in 15 clubs throughout several cities.
In 2009, when Hayon was 31, his father became ill with cancer. During a two-month break between treatments, Hayon took leave from his management job and went to India “to do some yoga and breathe.”
“Just before I came back to Israel, I wrote down all the things I wanted to start changing, and I concluded that in the end the only things that stay with you are the things you give. I wanted to give part of my life to the community, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do.”
That very day, a friend emailed him about Oded Weiss, an experienced youth counselor who had founded the Netina K’Derech Chaim (Giving as a Way of Life) Associationin 2007 and was seeking help to empower youth at risk in Kiryat Gat, a southern development town.
“I felt it was coming from karma, or from God; it was very mystical,” Hayon tells ISRAEL21c.
When the two men met, Weiss related that over the past two decades he had discovered that the best way to assisttroubled teens was to teach them how to give to others and thereby recognize their self-worth.
“I really liked that idea,” says Hayon.
In July 2009, Weiss and Hayon brought a tea kettle and some pillows to a parking lot in a crime-ridden neighborhood of Kiryat Gat. As night fell, they made a bonfire, steamed herbal tea and waited. Slowly,teenagers started arriving.
“While we were sitting around our campfire, we raised the issue of giving food to local people in need. The kids from the neighborhood knew better than anybody who was in need and were excited to be involved in distributing the food,” Hayon recalls.“From finding food for one family a week, our project has grown to giving to hundreds of families across Israel.”
The food distribution, carried out in cooperation with national poverty-fighting organization Latet and other NGOs, is carefully organized. Four teenagers and one adult volunteer do the shopping; another team organizes the food and delivers to the recipient’s door. They knock and then leave quickly, so as not to embarrass the family and to remain anonymous.
“When I bring a crate of food up to some family, I have shivers all over. I feel I’m doing the biggest, kindest act in the world,” says one SAHI member.
The weekly food distribution stops for nothing – not snow in Jerusalem, not missiles from Gaza.
However, SAHI youth do much more. They help people with disabilities, the elderly, the downtrodden and Holocaust survivors with shopping, chores and home repairs. They visit hospitals and nursing homes. If they see someone scavenging in a dumpster, they’ll follow the person home and make a note of the address.
“What we teach them is to open their eyes to anyone who needs help in the community,” says Hayon.“When you’re part of SAHI you’re on a mission all the time. If you see another kid in school sitting alone at recess, you need to go and talk to him and make sure he’s okay, maybe invite him to join your group of friends.”
This simple approach seems to work wonders.
“Before we were in SAHI we would sit around, messing things up, harassing the neighbors, making noise, burning stuff, wrecking the neighborhood, writing on walls. We were bored. Today all I think about is helping my neighbors,” says one SAHI participant.
When Hayon’s father passed away in 2010, he decided to honor his father’s memory by forming a SAHI group in Jerusalem, the city where the Hayons have lived for seven generations.
Now there are five Jerusalem clubs and two more are opening soon in cooperation with the municipality.Each city where SAHI operates pays the salaries of SAHI counselors; local adult volunteers also participate. The remainder of the operating budget comes from donations from individuals and foundations such as the Good People Fund and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
Seven SAHI groups are active in and around Kiryat Gat. There are groups in Ashkelon and Petah Tikva, and next in Rehovot,Bat Yam, Lod and Tel Aviv. “We have a big vision to have SAHI in every neighborhood in Israel,” says Hayon.
In response to requests from mayors, next year Hayon expects to adapt the SAHI model for Arab communities.
“Because our program is based very much on Jewish values and lifecycle, we’ll research verses from Koran about giving and helping, and will adjust it to their needs,” he says.
SAHI also is running a successful pilot group in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem and plans to open another.
Two offshoot projects recently kicked off: SAHI Golani, which takes 18-year-olds the army initially rejected and works to qualify them for the Golani brigade; and GPS (Girl Power SAHI),focused on issues specifically affecting female teens in the neighborhoods where SAHI is active.
An initiative called Palmach isaimed at stepping up altruistic activities in times of emergency such as last summer’s war, when Hayon and other SAHI leaders were called up to the reserves. Teens showing great promise are enrolled in SAHI’s Young Leaders course.
Until last year, Hayon personally led the first Kiryat Gat group. A grant from the US-based Good People Fund enabled him to become SAHI’s CEO and to hire Kiryat Gat native Yohai Buhbutas area coordinator for the South. Hayon’s army buddy Ronen Cohen, who has a doctorate in education, heads training and Weiss handles program development.
Though Hayon now guides SAHI from behind a desk, “My energy is always coming from the field, so I go once or twice a week to meet with the children,” he says. “I feel very lucky because I’m doing the thing I want to do the most.”
For more information, click here.
How troubled teens become goodwill envoys _ ISRAEL21c
Woman Breaks Through Chains of Forced Marriage, and Helps Others Do the Same
One day in March 2011, Fraidy Reiss went to her lawyer’s office to close on a house. The prosaic routine of paperwork somehow diminished her sense of accomplishment. Not even the seller was present to hear what she yearned to say.
She was only buying a Cape Cod on a small patch of lawn in a blue-collar neighborhood in New Jersey. Yet she and her two daughters had already named the place “Palais de Triomphe,” palace of triumph. The house symbolized her liberation from an arranged marriage, threats of violence at the hands of her estranged husband, and indeed the entire insular community of stringently Orthodox Jews among whom she had spent her entire life.
Four years later, on a blustery morning early this month, Ms. Reiss, 40, stood in a classroom at Rutgers University in Newark telling her story to three dozen lawyers. She spoke with well-practiced pacing and emphasis — childhood in Brooklyn, coerced betrothal in her teens to a man she barely knew, and then the harassment and stalking and death threats, all of it documented in court papers. Finally, there was college and therapy and, after 15 years of marriage, divorce.
Ms. Reiss spoke with a very specific purpose. The lawyers were attending a continuing education course sponsored by Unchained at Last, the nonprofit group that she founded four years ago to help women extricate themselves from arranged marriages. Her hope was that some of the lawyers would be moved to represent Unchained at Last’s clients without charge.
“It’s a moral imperative,” said Katherine Francis, a corporate lawyer from the Trenton area, after Ms. Reiss’s presentation. “I hadn’t even planned to be here, but you know how you start a Google search and wander? And all of a sudden I saw this class and thought, ‘Hmm, there’s the universe talking.’ ”
Unchained at Last operates in the contested crossroad between the modern secular concept of marriage for love between consenting adults and longstanding ethnic or communal customs of arranged marriage. Religion does not require such marriage, but is very often invoked to provide moral justification for it. And the laws of certain faiths, Orthodox Judaism in particular, give a husband the sole right to grant a divorce.
A reliable estimate of arranged marriages is difficult because the definition is inexact. But the Tahirih Justice Center, an advocacy group for immigrant women, reported that about 3,000 cases of “forced marriage” took place in the United States from 2009 through 2011.
Almost all of the 90 women whom Unchained at Last has helped had been pressured into marriage by their religious community: Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Unification Church. Most lived in the New York area, though one was in Arizona. The women’s nations of origin stretch through Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
On a basic level, Unchained at Last provides legal services because most of the women’s cases involve divorce and child custody litigation, and some extend into immigration status and restraining orders against a violent spouse. Because the clients’ situations can be so catastrophic — forced at gunpoint to accept a marriage, raped by a husband, essentially imprisoned within the home as a domestic servant — Unchained at Last also provides mentoring, access to therapy and cash stipends for everything from basic clothing to English as a second language class.
Ms. Reiss’s earliest collaborator was Shehnaz Abdeljaber, a Rutgers classmate of Palestinian Muslim ancestry. In their barrier-crossing friendship, the women discovered a common bond. Ms. Abdeljaber had been pushed by her parents into an engagement to a young man from her extended family whom she had never met. Though she managed to break off the engagement, the broader issue intrigued her.
“From the day I met Fraidy, I knew she was going to be part of my life,” Ms. Abdeljaber wrote in an email. “Little did I know that we weren’t going to be just friends. We became sisters, family and partners with her vision.”
In early 2011, Unchained at Last incorporated in New Jersey. Ms. Abdeljaber became the first president of the group’s board, which also included a Hindu woman, Kavitha Rajagopalan.
The annual budget back then came to barely $20,000, most of it from Ms. Reiss’s pocket. By now, Unchained at Last has a $3.4 million budget, with about $200,000 in donations from individuals and foundations and $3.2 million in free services from participating lawyers. In her own life, Ms. Reiss has become an atheist, and, after several years as a journalist, she became a private investigator.
Most clients find the group through word-of-mouth. At the outset, Ms. Reiss said, the organization struggled to find enough volunteer lawyers. Child-custody litigation is particularly difficult. Religious communities have been successful at times in turning out large numbers to paint Unchained’s client as an “unfit mother” because she has left the theological corral.
That has not deterred Ms. Reiss. Unchained at Last successfully lobbied in the New Jersey State Legislature last year for a law easing crime victims’ access to court records. This week, Ms. Reiss took part in an initialplanning session held by the White House Council on Women and Girls to develop a national policy on forced marriage.
Even in its more sophisticated form, though, Unchained at Last has retained the personal touch of what the Rev. Henri Nouwen, writing about ministry, called the “wounded healer.” Ditty Weiss, for one, experienced it.
After 10 years in an abusive marriage, Ms. Weiss decided to risk leaving both her husband and their fervently Orthodox community. The only problem was that she had no idea who could help her. In a sort of desperate whim, Ms. Weiss sent an email to Deborah Feldman, the author of an acclaimed memoir, “Unorthodox,” about her rejection of the Satmar Hasidic sect in which she had grown up.
Ms. Feldman steered Ms. Weiss to Ms. Reiss, who soon lined up two volunteer lawyers from a prominent Manhattan firm. When Ms. Weiss needed cancer surgery, Ms. Reiss babysat for her children. And as Ms. Weiss underwent chemotherapy, Unchained at Last gave her money to hire an au pair and a buy a used car.
“I cannot even describe,” Ms. Weiss recalled, “what it’s like to have an angel sweep down and kiss you on the forehead and then hold your hand and tell you, ‘I’m not letting go until you’re O.K.’ ”
Woman Breaks Through Chains of Forced Marriage, and Helps Others Do the Same – NYTimes