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/

Eleven Local New Jersey Social Service Agencies To Benefit from Colorado Woman’s Good Work

(May 1, 2014) Ranya Kelly, founder of the Colorado-based Redistribution Center will return to Millburn on May 5th, 6th and 7th with a ton of supplies to be sorted and donated to area social service agencies. Kelly has made the cross-country trip to the area several times.

Just last year, The Good People Fund, a Millburn-NJ based non profit that supports grassroots organizations founded by inspiring visionaries, joined forces with Congregation Bnai Israel and Ranya’s Redistribution Center for a second effort to bring more materials as well as moral support to the rural Appalachian community of McRoberts, Kentucky.  This year, the Good People Fund and B’nai Israel have teamed together to bring Ranya to Millburn and are looking for local volunteers to unload, sort, and distribute the materials to eleven area agencies. Volunteers from Temple B’nai Jeshurun will also be on hand to help out.

Interested families and individuals should contact the clergy office at CBJMillburn@aol.com or 973-379-3811 to get involved.

Ranya has been rescuing new merchandise to help families in need for over twenty years. Her work began after searching through a dumpster for a carton to mail some gifts. It was there that she discovered over 500 pairs of brand new shoes discarded by a nearby store. Her discovery led to the formation of the Redistribution Center, which has since rescued over 700,000 pairs of new shoes and millions of dollars worth of brand new, perfectly usable clothing, bedding, building supplies and more from local and national retail outlets. What was destined for a landfill is now filling the needs of impoverished people not only in the Denver area but also other parts of the United States.

Ranya first made her connection with New Jersey as a grantee of the Good People Fund (www.goodpeoplefund.org). The Good People Fund supports grass roots nonprofits led by inspiring visionaries like Ranya’s that respond to significant problems such as poverty, disability, trauma and social isolation.

For more information on how to get involved with this community social action initiative, contact CBJMillburn@aol.com or 973-379-3811.

http://thealternativepress.com/articles/founder-of-the-redistribution-center-in-colorado

New Grants From The Chronicle

Among the highlights:

The Herb Alpert Foundation has awarded $150,000 to the Good People Fund to help grass-roots nonprofits find inventive ways to address issues of poverty, hunger, illness, disability, and well-being.

In the fall of 2010, I had recently arrived in Tel Aviv and had started my New Israel Fund Fellowship at ASSAF, a humanitarian aid organization helping asylum seekers and refugees in Israel. I met Guy around then at the ASSAF offices. He spoke English, so I explained to him that I was researching the refugee community. He quickly agreed to advise me, help me meet community leaders and translate interviews.

One evening we walked around south Tel Aviv together, discussing his future goals and desire to go to college and help his people. We entered an ad-hoc shelter where at least 100 Sudanese men slept each night. The shelter was the basement of a building that the Sudanese community had rented out. Guy and I sat there for hours, conducting a group interview with around 10 men. Guy translated for me with astounding patience and care. From the beginning, it was obvious to me that he was dedicated to helping his people.

Guy was an asylum seeker himself. During the genocide in Darfur, he fled while his village was burning down, ran for his life and left his family behind. Through a mix of luck, a friendly personality and survival skills, Guy made his way through Sudan and Egypt to Israel, where he felt he would be safe from harm. He arrived in Israel in 2008.

I stayed in Israel until December of 2011. Around that time, Guy reached out to me saying he was applying to colleges in the U.S. and asking for help. I decided to write him a recommendation letter, explaining that he had served as my translator and recounting Guy’s positive attitude and the dedication he had to his fellow Darfuris.

He was accepted to one school, the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois. Someone in the admissions department had read his personal statement and had decided to take a chance. But he needed unofficial sponsors — U.S. citizens to vouch for him and tell the school they would support him financially if need be. I, along with two other people, agreed to it. We turned in our financial information to the school and they issued him a form he could use when requesting a visa, proving he had been accepted and that he had the funding he needed to attend.

I first started fundraising before Guy had a visa to come to the U.S. I managed to raise just enough for a one-way ticket from Israel by hosting a Legendary Bingo fundraiser led by a hilarious drag queen, to which only about 15 people showed up.

When I got the email that Guy had obtained a student visa from the U.S. Embassy in Israel, I was surprised. It’s literally a miracle, I told my family and friends. There was just no other explanation (and still isn’t to this day). Anna Rose Siegel, another friend of ours living in Israel at the time, helped Guy purchase his flight and I sent over the money. I knew I still would have to fundraise until Guy completed his studies because he would not be legally permitted to work in the U.S. on his student visa.

Guy is a friendly and resourceful person. The same way he reached out to me for help, he reached out to the one person he knew in Chicago — Tamar Shertok, another young Jewish American who had spent some time with asylum seekers in Tel Aviv.

Tamar wrote me that she wanted to help fundraise and together Tamar and I raised enough money to get Guy through two semesters of college. We had to cover everything — his housing, tuition, healthcare, phone, transportation, food and more.

Tamar reached out to Naomi Eisenberger, the Executive Director of the Good People Fund, and she agreed to help. The Good People Fund provides financial support, guidance, and mentoring to “charitable activities of modest proportions that are undertaken by Good People acting singly or in small groups.” They have been covering more than half of Guy’s tuition costs since his first semester. They also bought him a brand new computer when the used one he had broke.

Asked why she decided to help us help Guy, Naomi said she had been impressed by Guy’s story and his reputation in the refugee-directed NGO world. She added:

We were equally impressed with the actions of Maya Paley and Tamar Shertok who had agreed to “shepherd” Guy’s journey to the U.S. and a college career. Who would take on this extraordinary responsibility? As long as there were others who could help, we knew that our donors would be honored to be a part of this special mitzvah.

The Good People Fund believed in us and in what we had taken on and felt us worthy of their support.

But this past semester has been difficult. There were times when we did not know if we would be able to pay Guy’s rent the next month, let alone his tuition and books for school. And almost all of our personal networks have been tapped out for donations. Luckily, Alix Sherman, a psychotherapist in Chicago, stepped in to help out. She and her family took Guy in for part of the summer and have treated him like their own son. Alix’s son, a 13-year-old, even held a concert with his band and raised $3000 in one night.

We are now in the midst of Guy’s third semester and we are seeking the help of the Jewish community. A community that knows about intolerance, genocide and conflict. A community that knows that the truest miracle was when our ancestors received that little bit of help from a stranger, and that made all the difference.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/196851/-women-put-a-darfuri-survivor-through-college/#ixzz34ol80gvS

Los Angeles (PRWEB) April 18, 2014

The grant will benefit several of the nearly sixty ‘good people’ led organizations that find inventive ways to address issues of poverty, hunger, illness, disability and well-being. The grant is designed to support organizations within the United States and will help many of these groups provide food, clothing, compassion and support to the programs they lead in their communities. The commitment of the grantees to do this work, to be highly effective and to be able to make an impact in the world they live in, is a core philosophy shared by both the Good People Fund and the Herb Alpert Foundation.

The Herb Alpert Foundation (http://www.herbalpertfoundation.org) is the vision of legendary musician, sculptor, painter, producer, recording industry executive and philanthropist Herb Alpert and his wife, Lani Hall.

“We are grateful for the continued support the Herb Alpert Foundation has been able to provide the Good People Fund since our inception,” explains Naomi Eisenberger, the Good People Fund’s executive director. “It is our belief, that it is most often a single person or small group of good people, responding to the problems we find in our world, who can effect change and inspire all of us to do the same. It has been our privilege to find these visionaries who often work quietly, with little fanfare and recognition, and help them grow their work. With compassionate partners like the Alperts we have been able to offer financial support and mentorship to many creative and effective programs. In so doing we have eased the burden of hunger, homelessness, disability and more for untold numbers of people.” says Eisenberger.

“One of our priorities,” explained Rona Sebastian, President of The Herb Alpert Foundation, ” is to support programs that help individuals and families in times of difficulty. Through the Good People Fund’s very strategic grant making, we are able to touch many lives in meaningful ways.”

Founded in 2008, The Good People Fund, inspired by the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world), responds to significant problems such as poverty, disability, trauma and social isolation. The small to medium grassroots efforts we support, are leading their non-profits with annual budgets under $500,000 and no professional development staff but are driven and determined to make a difference in their communities. After all, small actions have huge impacts. With its guiding philosophy that small actions can have huge impacts and its emphasis on the personal connection, the GPF has raised and granted more than $5.4 million dollars since it was founded.

For more information on The Good People Fund or how you can support its grantees and their efforts, please contact Naomi Eisenberger at Naomi(at)goodpeoplefund(dot)org or visit their website at https://www.goodpeoplefund.org.

Contact: Rachel Litcofsky
508-314-4304 | Rachel(at)goodpeoplefund(dot)org
twitter: @goodpeoplefund | facebook.com/thegoodpeoplefund

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/04/prweb11774278.htm

Naomi Eisenberger has a background in business; she and her husband bought her father’s men’s clothing business, The Caldwell Men’s Shop, in 1982 and ran it until closing it in 1995. She has also been a teacher and a kosher caterer.

But when Rabbi Steven Bayar introduced her to the work of Danny Siegel while she was president of Congregation B’nai Israel in Millburn in the early 1990s, she fell in love. A poet and grassroots organizer, Siegel was running the Ziv Tzedaka Fund, a charity collective that disbursed millions of dollars to “mitzva heroes.” Siegel came to the synagogue as scholar-in-residence and eventually asked Eisenberger to join the staff as a volunteer.

“I felt like I had been appointed queen for the day!” she quipped. She would go on to work as a volunteer and later full-time staffer for the next 15 years.

When Ziv ended operations, the Good People Fund was one of its unofficial successors, and Eisenberger, 67, had to start from the beginning. Within one month she had commitments of $175,000 for each of two years. She envisioned the GPF as a 2.0 version of Ziv that would include more mentoring, an operation run on a sustainable business model that would outlast her.

In its first five years, GPF has funded over 60 projects, raising a total of between $4.5 million and $5 million. The goal is to split aid so that about half goes to mitzva projects in Israel, and half to recipients in the United States, although so far Israel is receiving slightly more. GPF also funds several projects in other countries.

Beyond that, recipients must address some area of social services — such as feeding the hungry and aiding those with disabilities or illnesses, Shoa survivors, seniors, veterans, or the poverty-stricken.

“None of this is rocket science, but it was all in my head. I want to build something that will continue when either God or I decide it’s time to stop,” she said. Although Siegel rarely approved funds to be used for staff salaries at recipient organizations — preferring to fund programs rather than overhead — and he limited staff at Ziv, Eisenberger sees things differently.

“There are so many programs where the founder is melting into the ground, overwhelmed. You cannot grow without the proper support. We do hand-holding and mentoring and I can tell when someone is pushed to the limit, and I won’t hesitate to provide funds to take a load off of the founder’s plate.” She does, however, keep her own staff to a Spartan two — herself and associate director Debbie Klein — and both work out of their homes to limit overhead.

Eisenberger’s goal is to have the projects she funds outgrow the GPF, which she defines as reaching and surpassing a budget of $500,000. She finds every “good person” herself, mostly by reading — newspapers, magazines, blogs, even crowd-sourcing sites on the Internet. She does not take requests. “We like to say, ‘Don’t be in touch with us; we’ll be in touch with you,’” she said.

The basic requirement for recipients is in the name itself. “You have to have good people. You have to have a visionary. There are lots of good organizations out there, but you need a vision,” said Eisenberger.

“And we will only step in when an organization has not yet attracted large donors, for the most part.” That means it must have a budget of under her magic number: half a million dollars.

“This is an exciting model with tremendous impact,” she said. “We basically take the hand of the donor and put it in the hand of the recipient without either of them knowing. That’s the best kind of personalized tzedaka.”

Eisenberger loves her work. “I get to do good stuff all day long,” she said. “I don’t know any other job like it. There is such tremendous power in being able to help people.”

http://www.njjewishnews.com/article/17754/i-get-to-do-good-stuff-all-day-long#.U5IMnPnNEml