McROBERTS, Ky. — The morning mist hovers over the narrow valley in the lush Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. A creek rushing by the side of the main road passes through the town of Neon in once prosperous Letcher County, deep in the state’s coal mining region.

The empty storefronts reflect the industry’s losing battle with mechanization, depleted coal deposits, and cheaper-to-mine western coal. Up the road a piece, people sit in rocking chairs on the porches of mostly rundown homes watching the days go by. There are few jobs here for high school graduates — perhaps a handful at a nearby Wal-Mart or other big-box stores, or maybe a job at one of the few restaurants in town.

Teachers, with their government paychecks, form the area’s elite. In Letcher County, 26 percent of residents live below the poverty line; in smaller towns like McRoberts, up to 48.5 percent of children live in poverty and 91 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch.

On June 2, four vans filled with 16 volunteers, a combination of retirees and college or graduate students in their 20s, plus one journalist and one education specialist, pulled into the parking lot of a motel in Whitesburg, Letcher’s county seat. About 10 hours earlier, they had left their homes in Essex County, NJ — mostly Millburn/Short Hills but also Maplewood, Livingston, and towns farther west — in the early morning.

Members of Congregation B’nai Israel of Milburn and supporters of the Millburn-based Good People Fund, the volunteers had come for the fourth year in a row to assist local residents, sprucing up the trailer of a divorced woman raising three grandchildren, decluttering the rundown home of an older woman living alone, and sharing expertise with educators and families of children with autism.

It’s an unusual pairing of wealthy New Jersey suburb and struggling Appalachian town, a synagogue’s response not to a sudden natural disaster but to festering economic dysfunction, and a rare demonstration of how people from very different worlds can try — even if they do not always succeed — to create a long-term relationship.

Rabbi Steven Bayar got the whole project started when he decided he wanted to get his congregants out of their comfort zones, away from their homes, to another part of the United States.

“Every congregation raises money and is invested in tzedaka programs in their communities,” he said. “We all support organizations in Israel and some support other causes and organizations by sending money. But when we focus on what is nearby or easy we lose an important lesson — that there are those in need all over and that creating ongoing personal relationships are as important to us as to them.”

Naomi Eisenberger, a past president of B’nai Israel, coordinates the whole effort as executive director of the Good People Fund, a nearly $1 million tzedaka collective she has run out of her Millburn home since 2008.

After a few false starts in other communities, B’nai Israel, with the help of GPF, settled on McRoberts. If the town is foreign to his congregants, it is not exactly out of Bayar’s own comfort zone. Although he spent his early years in Monsey, NY, Bayar’s family moved to Charlottesville, Va., when he was in high school. Although it is a college town, Charlottesville contains pockets of rural poverty. “There were kids who didn’t come to school in the winter when it snowed because they didn’t have shoes,” he recalled.

Bayar believes strongly in mitzva projects that become ongoing relationships.

“It’s easy to go once and feel good and then forget who was there,” he said. However, a long-term commitment “creates responsibility and relationship. We are now beginning to know the people well and, because of that, they are beginning to ask us to help in ways we never envisioned. Who would have thought that they need special educators to meet with parents? We would never have thought of it — and yet, it may be the most lasting impact we have had.”

The initiative is also more complicated than a one-time mitzva day.

“More than anything else it gives perspective,” he said. “It’s hard to return from Appalachia and worry about my air-conditioning breaking down (which it did). It teaches me the meaning of resilience. The residents we work with are my teachers in life.”

Muscle and advice

During their two-and-a-half days in Kentucky, the volunteers divided into three groups. The largest would work on Saundra Hall’s home, a double-wide trailer in Seco, near McRoberts, across from what was originally the coal mine’s company store. Hall, divorced and the mother of four grown children, is raising her eldest son’s three daughters, Shayla, 10; Kennedi, 6; and Charleigh Beth, 5. Their father was sucked under by drugs; the landscape is dotted with the remains of trailers that were once crystal meth labs. Hall’s ex had raised that son; she raised the rest of the clan.

Amanda and Johnny Hall, Saundra’s oldest daughter and youngest son (her third son still works in the coal mines), were eager to help the crew as they got busy changing light fixtures, spackling, taping, and painting three rooms. Later, new carpet would be laid in four rooms. In each case, one of the volunteers with expertise took the lead and would serve as foreman.

Another group of the New Jerseyans consisted of education specialist Sara Wasserman of Livingston and two graduate students. Wasserman, who runs her own consulting company for special and typical education and coordinates professional development at Golda Och Academy’s upper school, is an instructor of inclusive early childhood education at Montclair State University. She and the students spent their time at a storefront serving as a community center in Neon, just west of McRoberts, providing training, tips, and materials to educators and families of children and teens with autism. They also taught rescue workers how to identify and manage the challenges autistic children can present in an emergency situation.

On day one, only two people showed up.

“I was disappointed and frustrated, to come all this way for one or two people,” said Wasserman, a member of Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston who grew up at B’nai Israel. And those who came were “dubious,” and “almost angry,” she said. They were “uncertain whether to trust us.”

But by day three, eight people came, and later, others who wanted to take part but could not attend for various reasons contacted Wasserman.

“Mostly, they needed someone educated in the field to come in and say they were doing the right things,” said Wasserman. “They have to travel six hours just to get a diagnosis, and there is no psychiatrist around. These are parents who are as involved, engaged, and active as any parents I’ve ever known. But they are parents without resources who can’t get their kids the help they need.”

Asked if she would return, she said, “I think I have to.”

http://www.njjewishnews.com/article/17753/those-we-work-with-are-my-teachers-in-life#.U5IN0PnNEmk

For hundreds of African refugees living in Tel Aviv, a good breakfast starts in northern New Jersey.

For two-and-a half months, the Millburn-based Good People Fund has been providing the money — $200 a day — to serve breakfast to as many as 500 people in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park.

The small fund channels money to small-scale, mostly volunteer charitable projects. For a number of years, the fund had helped the Tel Aviv-based African Refugees Development Center, founded by an Ethiopian political refugee in 2004.

“In February, when the situation got to be sort of critical, we started to raise funds to provide a breakfast,” explained Naomi Eisenberger, the fund’s director and sole employee.

February was when the refugee situation hit the news, after a homeless man froze to death in Levinsky Park. In response, advocates for the migrants protested in front of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence with a mock coffin. Advocates said the plight of the African migrants, said to number as many as 50,000, had been aggravated by government policies designed to discourage asylum-seekers.

In a partial response, the Tel Aviv municipality quietly installed a shipping container in the park, which sheltered 50 migrants.

Since then, the politics around the Africans has grown only more heated, with prominent politicians warning they are “a cancer” on Israeli society. Some have been beaten or firebombed.

Eisenberg said that “as Americans, we really have no right to judge Israel on what they’re doing. We’re just looking at this from a humanistic point of view. These are hungry people who need to be fed until such a time as the government decides what to do.”

As it happens, one of the fund’s board members was in Tel Aviv this winter. Allen Katzoff — a Boston resident who served as director of Camp Ramah in New England and director of the Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Boston Hebrew College — is a Good People Fund board member who has been living half the year in Tel Aviv while his wife teaches at Bar-Ilan University.

It was Katzoff who met the key volunteer who makes the breakfast program possible: Gideon Ben-Ami, a retired restaurateur.

“Gideon is one of these amazing human beings,” one of the “Good People” the fund was founded to support in their charitable efforts, said Katzoff. “He goes around much of every day collecting food from various bakeries and supermarkets, where they’re going to get rid of it, and distributes it to various shelters.”

Ben-Ami had helped out a church group that was helping the refugees, and he told Katzoff that there was a real need to serve breakfast because “these people are sitting around all day long starving until the evening comes.”

‘It fills them up’

So far, the breakfast program has served more than 30,000 meals.

Ben-Ami collects the food. “Without him, there would be nothing,” said Katzoff.

The actual preparation and distribution has been taken over by a small organization of the African refugees, Bnei Darfur. “Both Gideon and I were able to step back,” said Katzoff. “It’s much better if the refugees can do it themselves.”

The menu depends on what is collected.

Sometimes, it is bourekas; sometimes it is leftover pizza (not very popular among the Africans).

“What they really love is bread,” said Katzoff. “We cut it up, serve it as sandwiches with jelly or cream cheese. It fills them up.”

In the winter, they served hot tea. Now, it is an orange drink.

Because most of the meal is donated, the cost of a morning’s breakfast is only 40 cents per meal.

“We’re doing this on a month-to-month basis, as long as our funds hold out,” said Eisenberger. “Our attitude is that we have to leave politics aside. These are hungry people and they’re totally and completely helpless. Someone has to feed them. You can’t let them starve in the middle of Tel Aviv.

“All of us are very aware of the political situation and the volatility of it. Allen Katzoff, who has been spending winters there many years, said to me a while back that this is going to explode, and it has blown up. It’s distressing to see what’s happening.”

 

http://njjewishnews.com/article/9786/for-african-migrants-shelter-in-a-storm#.UFx5La4f_eQ

“Why on earth would you go to rural Kentucky?” was the one question I heard time and again prior to my visit to the town of McRoberts. Ostensibly, I was joining a group of about 40 people — two synagogue delegations led by the not-for-profit organization, The Good People Fund — that was going to fix up homes and deliver food and other essentials to an impoverished former mining town deep in the Appalachians. But in reality, I didn’t have a good answer for why I was going to leave the comfort and familiarity of New York City to fly via Charlotte, North Carolina, then into Charleston, West Virginia and then drive the final three hours deep into the Kentucky mountains. For all of my ambivalence, something compelled me to go.

I had done my homework before the trip and I steeled myself for what I was going to experience: a town of fewer than 900 inhabitants that was struggling to stay afloat since the mining interests left the area about 30 years ago. I learned about the high unemployment rate, the rampant drug use and the general sense of hopelessness that pervaded the community. But I also heard about the efforts of a few people — outsiders and locals alike — who banded together in an effort to improve the lot of the town. Could they really make a difference, or was the deck already stacked against them, I wondered.

My real reason for going was because I wanted to see for myself what happens when a town outlives its usefulness to the global economy; to get a better grasp of the true human cost of the decline of American industry. Is it possible that McRoberts is a place where people have become superfluous?

Driving in to Letcher County on highway 119, the first thing that struck me was the beauty of the countryside. Looking up, toward the sky, all I could see were rolling mountains covered with lush green trees in all directions. But down in the valleys, far from the heavens, there’s only blight. Dilapidated houses. Broken down cars. A stray gas station. Family Dollar stores. The occasional fast food restaurant. This was it. Rural Kentucky. I was in it.

The first morning, after picking up all the necessary supplies, a group of us began painting the house of a woman who is raising her grandchildren by herself because their parents, her children, are too strung out on drugs to take care of the kids. She’s not the only one in this situation. Later that day, the principal of the elementary school told me that many grandparents are raising their grandkids as a generation of parents is lost to drugs. The principal told me of the difficulties in getting some kids to come to school on time or to attend at all. They come from families who don’t value education themselves, who don’t read with their children, who often can’t get up in the morning to make sure that their kids get to school on time. Some kids come to school hungry. Others leave school for the weekend without knowing when they’re going to eat again.

The house we were painting looked like it should have been condemned rather than painted. Planks in the porch roof were hanging on for dear life and I truly feared that just scraping the old paint from them would cause them to crash down, bringing the entire house with it. Back porch screens were ripped to shreds and the back yard was strewn with old and rusted toys and furniture; remnants, perhaps, of a once better life.

Some of the volunteers were bewildered upon seeing a large, flat-screen TV inside one of the homes that was being renovated. The implication was clear: if they are so desperate, why do they have such an expensive television? Wouldn’t that money be better spent on something more practical? Maybe so, but I can’t begrudge anyone who lives in that remote location with so few amenities of modern life for wanting to own a nice TV set. We were lucky to be in McRoberts during the summer; I was told that life becomes harsher during the winter months. Roads become impossible to navigate when covered with ice and snow; a phenomenon that can cause the local schools to close down for days at a time. The kids lose between 20-30 school days a year due to the extreme weather conditions. If a nice TV helps get people through these rough patches, so be it, I concluded.

The woman cried when she saw the (nearly) completed paint job and said, “But there’s so much more to do.” She’s right. A new paint job will not repair the years of neglect from which her home suffers. But it’s a start. Maybe when she sees her house now, the woman will smile and be reminded that things can be better. Still, hoping that “good people” will come to the rescue isn’t a long term or sustainable solution for her problems or those of the town. The best thing that they can hope for is that the people who run the schools can reach a few of the students and show them that their real salvation is through education.

Drug addiction. Unemployment. A culture that doesn’t emphasize learning and achievement. What hope does a young person growing up there have? If they are lucky, they’ll have parents who want them to get an education. If they are lucky they’ll have a principal who makes sure that the elementary school has enough books for them to read despite the meager budget that is allocated by the state. If they are lucky, they’ll stay away from the drugs that continue to ravage generation after generation of young people.

Some wait for a miracle. The mines will reopen. Factories will spring up. Jobs will be more readily available and there will be a future. But those are just dreams. There’s not much to save the town or its people except for the people themselves. And sadly, many of them aren’t the least bit equipped, able or interested in doing that.

As I drove out of McRoberts after a few days, the answer of what will happen to this town was no clearer to me than it was before I arrived. But there was a profound difference; the people who lived there, so easily derided as a bunch of “dumb hillbillies,” became human to me. Just like the rest of us, they wake up every morning and struggle to deal with what life hands them. Their circumstances are more dire than most, perhaps, but their stories deserve to be heard.

Read the orginal article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-rothschild/kentucky-journey_b_934296.html

 

Millburn synagogue sends food, volunteers to poor Kentucky town

 

When Tisha B’Av arrives on the evening of Aug. 8, it may be the first time the day of mourning will have been observed anywhere near McRoberts, Ky., an isolated Appalachian hamlet with fewer than 1,000 residents.

Members of Congregation B’nai Israel in Millburn are heading to the town on Aug. 7 on a five-day volunteer mission, part of a program coordinated by the Good People Fund.

It is the second time B’nai Israel has traveled to McRoberts as a group, and the third for Rabbi Steven Bayar, who is attempting to establish a long-term relationship between the congregation and the community.

Bayar hopes he and his congregants can make a difference in the area, where the average per capita income was estimated in 2009 at $10,934. His goal is to establish a presence there several times a year, with the help of partnering synagogues.

As they did on their previous trip, the B’nai Israel members will deliver a truckload of food and shoes and will spend time doing repairs on five area homes. The Good People Fund, a Millburn-based tzedaka collective, is providing funds for materials and to pay local workers who will assist the volunteers.

Several volunteers will run a two-day after-school camp for students at the McRoberts Elementary School, which begins its new school year next week; an alcohol and drug counselor will also work with the local community through the efforts of the Good People Fund.

“We are becoming more specific in our work there and developing relationships with individuals,” said Bayar. “As we learn what they need, we can plan more effectively.”

There is no Jewish community in the area; the nearest Jewish communities are located in Bluefield, W.Va. (125 miles away), where there is one Reform synagogue; Charleston, W.Va. (145 miles away), and Lexington, Ky. (160 miles away).

This time, B’nai Israel recruited a group from Congregation Shaarey Shamayim in Lancaster, Pa., to join them. That contingent is led by Rabbi Jack Paskoff, an old acquaintance of Bayar’s. In planning the trip, Bayar realized it would overlap with Tisha B’Av.

“We are limited in the weeks we can go. The area is not open to us from December through April because of storms and inaccessibility,” he said in an e-mail sent a few days before the trip. “Because this was the best time for Jack’s congregation to go, we decided we would schedule it now.”

Bayar said he imagines that spending Tisha B’Av in Appalachia will add significance to the day, in which Jews mourn the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem and other calamities in Jewish history by fasting. “In the midst of remembering our greatest tragedies, we are engaging in tikun olam; we are demonstrating that we will not be denied our ultimate goal as Jews,” he wrote.

Services will be held on Tuesday evening in Whitesburg, Ky., where the group is staying and which is 15 miles from McRoberts. Bayar isn’t sure whether the people in McRoberts know anything about any Jewish holidays. “We will invite them to be with us and talk to them about it,” he said.

Also joining them will be volunteers from California and Ohio, organized through the Good People Fund; Naomi Eisenberger, a member of B’nai Israel, is the founder and director of the fund, which was established in 2008. She said 38 volunteers will be taking part this time around.

In the spring of 2012, Bayar said, he hopes to bring along a contingent of doctors and

Read the orginal article at http://njjewishnews.com/article/6072/shul-to-mark-tisha-bav-with-tzedaka-mission#.TzhclsX–U5

 

We live in an age when nonprofits are more ubiquitous than Starbucks coffee shops, and the larger ones inundate mailboxes everywhere with pleas for money in exchange for some personalized return address labels. Considering the sheer number of “mega charities” out there, it can be hard to determine which are run by good people doing truly good things who put donated funds to work with minimal overhead.

Naomi Eisenberger, executive director of the Good People Fund, has a knack for sniffing out those gems that often go undetected by the larger population of donors with money to give.

Eisenberger, frequently called a fairy godmother by the directors of the grantee charities she supports, incorporated the Good People Fund as a nonsectarian – but very Jewishly influenced – 501c3 in January 2008. It was her intent to discover and support small non-profits who are trying to do their small bit toward tikkun olam and tzedakah with few resources, to guide and mentor those grantees and to educate others about the process and power of helping others.

“We look for grassroots,” says the New Jersey resident. “Our focus is good people. There are many wonderful small programs out there, but what differentiates us is that each program is started by an individual or small group of people who are responding to a need they have come across. Something in their life has brought them to start what they’ve started.”

In fact, it was prior experience volunteering, and then working, with a similar boutique non-profit for about 16 years that inspired Eisenberger to establish the Good People Fund. When Danny Siegel, director of Ziv Tzedakah Fund, whose mission mirrored that of the Good People Fund, announced his retirement and the board decided to close, Eisenberger, a board member at Ziv, “blurted out” within 30 seconds that she was starting over, “because it was too important to end. I wasn’t ready to retire, and all the programs we supported were small. They were grassroots, and it was really a very big loss for many of them. It was also a loss for many of our donors, who had come to rely on us for the very distinct type of tzedakah work we did.”

Eisenberger immediately reached out to Ziv’s donors and grantees, taking many of them with her to the Good People Fund. When you understand the operating principles at work at the Good People Fund, their eagerness to make the transition is no surprise.

“I think when someone makes a gift to the Good People Fund, they can rest assured that only a tiny percentage goes for administration,” says Allen Katzoff, one of the organization’s seven volunteer board members. “Naomi is the only paid staff person, and even her salary is a designated grant. The money goes to end users, and many of the organizations we support are similar. Many are volunteer run, or they have very small staffs, and so they do the same thing, basically. It’s a flow-through to the end user, and the recipient gets a tremendous percentage of the money given. That’s the beauty of supporting small organizations.”

According to Katzoff, the Good People Fund supports two types of organizations. First are the small, mostly volunteer-run non-profits who are doing great work serving specific populations – the hungry, the poor, the sick. They they don’t really have ambitions to grow – they’re just doing the work that needs to be done. The second type of organization, Katzoff says, is more like small start-ups. They have very transformative ideas that could one day play a part in citizens’ everyday lives.

“Once they get big enough and they’re attracting larger gifts from others,” Katzoff says, “The Good People Fund then moves on to find other small organizations. We want to help them stand on their own two feet and move up to the next level.”

Part of that process is serving as a mentor and teacher to the directors of the grantee nonprofits – a job that falls to Eisenberger.

“I have a unique set of skills I’ve developed over 18 years of working with small non-profits,” says Eisenberger, who, prior to that, was also a high school U.S. history teacher, a mom, a plant doctor and an entrepreneur in needlepoint craftwork and men’s clothing. “They have unique problems and situations, so I spend a considerable amount of my time giving them concrete advice on how they should operate with efficiency and transparency…For most of the programs we work with, we develop a very strong personal relationship, and we’re there through the good times and the not so good times. Our wish is that every program we work with outgrow us, and that they grow to a certain point where they can flourish without our funds.”

Part of building that personal relationship means Eisenberger and her board members make sure they visit in person each of the organizations they support on a regular basis. In early March, she’d just returned from a trip to Israel to meet with the organizations the Good People Fund supports there.

“It’s very important to us that the funds we donate have an impact,” Eisenberger says. “We always contribute funds for specific needs, and we like to know those funds are making a considerable difference. We do a tremendous amount of due diligence. We demand a lot of transparency from the programs we work with.”

Adds Katzoff, “Many of these organizations’ [directors] are people who are interested in doing good work. Some of them are volunteering full time. These are amazing people, and it’s always humbling being in their presence when I meet them. But they don’t necessarily have business or even non-profit backgrounds, so they need help running their organization, they need advice, and Naomi has learned to be an amazing mentor to them. She helps them, gives them advice, refers them to all sorts of resources, or just brainstorms with them…On top of all that, the Good People Fund provides them with funding. In another industry, we might be called a turnkey operation.”

Eisenberger, who works out of what was once her son’s bedroom, devotes her schedule full-time to finding, mentoring and supporting the approximately 60 organizations the Good People Fund supports.

Of those non-profits, many are either started and run by Jews or focused on helping segments of the Jewish community. The organization is tied up in Jewish values. Its roots, for example, lie in Maimonides-inspired tzedakah. Through quiet assistance and donations, the final recipients are being given a hand up, so that the Good People Fund’s support will ultimately help its grantee charities, and those charities’ recipients, sustain themselves. Eisenberger herself is Jewish, as are many of her board members. Even if an organization is non-sectarian, chances are its founder is Jewish.

Missions of Good People Fund non-profits are as varied as the charities are plentiful, and for every donor, regardless of their passion, there is a charity with which Eisenberger can match their interests and direct their funds – whether the donor is a bar mitzvah boy donating $18 or a family foundation giving $100,000. In Israel, Beit Frankforter is a group of elderly women who make about 500 sandwiches for hungry school kids in Jerusalem; Birthday Angels is a mom/former party-planner who throws birthday parties for needy kids; and Yaakov Maimon Volunteers helps Israel’s newest citizens adjust to their new home. In the U.S., Volunteers in Psychotherapy is a benevolent psychotherapist who agrees to treat clients at a reduced rate in exchange for their volunteer work; Home Front Hearts is a military mom with an often-deployed husband and four young children who helps other military families that fall through the cracks; and AmpleHarvest.org is a backyard gardener who realized that an answer to America’s hunger can be found in the excess produce found in countless Americans’ backyard gardens.

Though all the organizations the Good People Fund supports are equally honest and noble in their works, Eisenberger says, two exemplify the kinds of deeds common among them.

Both Gary Oppenheimer and Randi Cairns (both Jewish) of AmpleHarvest.org and Home Front Hearts, respectively (both New Jersey-based non-profits), lived their charities’ missions in their own lives first. Oppenheimer, an avid gardener and proponent of environmental sustainability, devised an online system to connect gardeners nationwide who had excess produce to their local food banks, thereby getting fresh, healthy food into the hands of the hungry without costing the donor a dime.

Cairns, who knew the struggles of a military family when her own husband was deployed to Afghanistan, decided to put her non-profit background to use in creating her own organization to assist military families in the U.S. whose needs could not be met by military or other resources. (See sidebars for more information on both of these charities.)

Both Oppenheimer and Cairns work with few resources and modest or no salaries (and in Cairns’ case, with frequent pauses to shush her four screaming children as she helps beneficiaries over the phone), yet, with the help of the Good People Fund and a handful of other benefactors, have managed to succeed.

Contrary to countless other philanthropic endeavors, the Good People Fund has also thrived in the U.S.’s down economy. Though Eisenberger says she has no idea how they’ve managed to become incorporated and grow at the height of the recession, according to Katzoff, the answers are simple.

“It hasn’t affected us, I think because our donors are looking to get the greatest bang for their buck, and they’re looking for a really efficient way to make donations,” he says. “Also, the needs we address are so great right now, and people are recognizing that. There’s a greater awareness [of things like hunger and poverty], and the people who have money understand that in these times, especially, they have to give.”

For more information on the kind of work the Good People Fund is making possible, visit www.goodpeoplefund.org or call (973) 761-0580.

————

/COLUMN: Feature

A Bounty for Sharing

Organization: AmpleHarvest.org

Founder and director: Gary Oppenheimer, 58

Created: March 2009, incorporated April 2010

Ah-ha moment: “I realized the combined problem of both hunger in the country and the challenge of too many gardeners growing excess food, which was going to waste.”

Mission: To enable the more than 40 million people who grow food in home gardens to be able to find a neighborhood food pantry where they can donate excess garden produce (which Oppenheimer estimates could be billions of pounds), using an easy search on AmpleHarvest.org.

How the Good People Fund helped: Funding early and ongoing incidentals and start-up costs to get the non-profit off the ground, offering guidance and mentorship. Has funded a free AmpleHarvest.org iPhone app and is funding one for the Android, currently in development, among other projects. “I can’t imagine Naomi touching anything that doesn’t touch the gold. That’s how she operates. This is not an impersonal foundation. It’s more like you’re being adopted by somebody and they’re going to give you college money, but you still have a home to go back to.”

Proud moment: Becoming a CNN Hero in April 2010.

Newest additions: A “gleaning” component on the Web site, in which home gardeners can search for a local gleaning organization, who will harvest the gardener’s excess produce for them free of charge so they can donate it. Also, gardeners will be able to print from the Web site an information sheet about their fruit or vegetable to include with their donation, so recipients know just what they’ve received.

Current standing: About 3,400 food pantries nationwide have registered with AmpleHarvest.org’s network. That’s about one-tenth of all U.S. food pantries. Oppenheimer’s goal is 10,000 pantries, or about one in three, in the network within three years.

———

Heroes Back Home

Organization: Home Front Hearts

Founder and director: Randi Cairns, mom to four, wife to a soldier

Incorporated: late 2008

Ah-ha moment: “My husband was deployed to Afghanistan. Here I was with my military family and not getting what we needed. I figured if I was struggling as someone who is pretty comfortable [finding support and resources], then that was probably the case for the typical military family, and so it became a matter of how to use what I’d learned [in my professional career] to make access and information available to other families.”

Mission: To serve military families nationwide in need of extra support with resources, direct interaction, case management and volunteer projects. Also to educate and engage communities about the needs of military families from every branch of service.

How the Good People Fund helped: Funded start-up items and provided direct support to military families. Funded a pay-it-forward program for wounded warrior spouses who earn income by working for the organization to help others like themselves. “Part of what is special about the Good People Fund is that so much goes on behind the scenes. These magical things happen for the families I work with, and they never know where it came from. I think in a world where people are very big on ‘I want you to know what I did,’ it is such a fabulous way to operate.”

Standout feature: “We don’t ever say no…It’s not that we just deliver services, but that we do it as people who are living the same life. I’m not guessing what your family needs or pretending to understand. I’m living this very same life and trying to care for these families the same way I would want someone to care for mine.”

Current standing: During the holidays last year, they provided $25,000 worth of support, gifts and necessities to families in seven states. Ultimately, Cairns would like to see a Home Front Hearts physical presence and paid staff in all 50 states, though its resources via phone and Internet are already national in scope.

They still receive referrals for Gulf War military families and Vietnam veterans. As far as Operation Enduring Freedom vets, Cairns says, “There’s still a lot we don’t know. This is one percent of our country, and one percent of our country’s families, fighting for more than a decade. I would be very happy to be put out of business, but where there is this need, this is my larger family, and this is where I’ll be, doing my part.”

Read the orginal article at http://sdjewishjournal.com/site/1874/the-fairy-goodmother/

 

Millburn team delivers the goods to rural community

 

rmau000_c.jpgConsidering the enormous cultural and economic gulf between Millburn, New Jersey, and McRoberts, Kentucky, it’s actually surprising that it takes only 10 hours by car to get from one to the other, said Rabbi Steven Bayar.

The religious leader of Congregation B’nai Israel was looking for a tzedaka project for his synagogue’s members that would target a specific area, but one not so close to home. His goal, he said, was to “open congregants’ eyes” to the “overwhelming need in the United States for people to look out for each other.”

The project he found was, according to all reports, eye-opening.

Partnering with the Good People Fund – whose founder, Naomi Eisenberger, is a B’nai Israel member – Bayar took 11 congregants on a tzedaka mission to the rural town of McRoberts in the heart of Appalachia in early June.

Because of the very difficult economic situation in northeastern Kentucky, he said, the experience “was grueling – very rewarding, but grueling.”

Eisenberger explained why. “Only 25 percent of their kids go on to any kind of higher education after high school [and] there are no jobs and very little hope. Those who graduate high school have choices: They can work in Walmart or a restaurant. There are no professional jobs.”

The Good People Fund, which is also in Millburn and was established in 2008, recognizes and supports the work of small grassroots organizations and individuals.

Eisenberger described what the mission members found in Kentucky. “This is not Harlem. This is not Newark. This is something most people have not seen, and it is compounded because the town is so remote,” she said. “It took me three days to get out of the depression I was in from being there.”

McRoberts has a population of 700 and no viable commerce. Founded by Consolidation Coal in 1912, the town’s median income, according to the 2000 census, was $18,000 for households, and a full 33 percent of the population was listed as living below the poverty line. McRoberts is 40 miles from the nearest movie theater and a half-hour’s drive to the nearest large supermarket, according to Eisenberger.

GPF got involved in the town when Eisenberger learned that many of its children were receiving federally funded meals in school, but often had nothing to eat on the weekends. The first project the fund supported was supplying backpacks filled with food for the weekend that children could pick up as they left school on Friday.

On the mission that the B’nai Israel members were on, which Eisenberger accompanied, most of the group spent the bulk of their time at the middle school/high school campus that serves McRoberts in nearby Jenkins. For three days, the volunteers unloaded two large truckloads of goods: housewares, books, clothing, and the like. The volunteers set them up in a local school gymnasium and then served as “personal shoppers,” helping local families find the items they needed.

It was Eisenberger’s third trip to the area, Bayar’s second. In addition to the B’nai Israel contingent, she brought other GPF associates, including mitzva clowns from Long Island, a member of Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange, and a couple who belong to Congregation Beth El there.

For Eisenberger, the project was a coming together of a number of the “good people” her organization supports. The trucks were sent from Redistribution Center, Inc., in Denver, which takes donations of household goods and clothing from major retailers who can no longer sell the items and gives them to people in need. (B’nai Israel worked with the organization before, distributing goods in Newark.)

The food was provided by the Youngstown Food Pantry, also supported by the GPF.

During the mission, Bayar said, he and a few B’nai Israel members also met with a group of youngsters and adults at the high school, serving as “ambassadors of the Jewish community” to the people of McRoberts, many of whom had never met a Jew before.

Art Fredman of Millburn, one of the B’nai Israel participants, described the culture shock of arriving in McRoberts. He felt, he said, “like we might be in another country. I had never been among people who seemed so devoid of hope about their future and so generally defeated in their lives.”

During his stay in Kentucky, Fredman said, he had the opportunity to drive into the “hollows” – pronounced “hollers” – where many local residents live. “You leave the paved main road and go up a one-lane road overgrown with bushes and scrub trees…. Every 50 feet or so there’s another home. They are broken-down camphouses built for miners at the turn of the last century. Some are barely standing; some of the houses tilt. They’ve never been painted and they’re all in terrible condition.

“The people are sitting on what look like unsafe porches, just kind of staring,” Fredman said.

Steve Moehlman of Short Hills called the experience “life-changing.” And yet, he said, he was surprised to discover how much he has in common with some of the Kentuckians he met. “What I took away was how special the people are,” he said. As he “shopped” with the locals, he chatted with them. He remembered talking with a machinist about 50 years old who has three children. “He was very proud of his children,” something, said Moehlman, he can relate to since he himself is the father of two teenagers.

“By the end of the conversation, we were friends – even though he wears overalls and looks like a hillbilly. Once you get past the layers, we had a lot in common,” Moehlman said.

That commonality didn’t necessarily stop, he said, when the topic of Israel or his being Jewish came up. The machinist was extremely supportive of Israel and applauded the Jews for their business acumen, an attitude he said he learned from his father. “I didn’t delve too deeply but I was impressed with his views,” said Moehlman, “since there are not any Jews there.”

Which is not to minimize the vast differences between the visitors and the local people they encountered. The New Jerseyans noted the illiteracy prevalent among many of McRoberts residents and the poor health they seem to suffer from – rotting teeth and obesity are commonplace – exacerbated by the lack of quality medical care. There is also rampant abuse of prescription drugs. It was not uncommon for the volunteers to discover that the people they were assisting were raising their grandchildren. “An entire generation has been lost to prescription drug addiction,” said Eisenberger.

Ina Wallman of Short Hills, a mother of four children ranging in age from 11 to 16, went to Kentucky despite difficulties in scheduling. “We live in such a privileged community. We are blessed to be able to do so,” she said. “But it’s also a myopic, closed-off society. We forget the real world is a different place. I needed to get some perspective on what’s worth having. And I want my children to know there are people who can’t afford to live in houses, to buy food, clothes, even linens.”

She said she would go back “in a minute.”

One goal of B’nai Israel’s participation, according to Bayar, was to create the foundation for a long-term relationship between the synagogue and McRoberts, with the hope that they will be able to bring educational advantages and a more positive outlook to the people of Kentucky.

Read the orginal article athttp://njjewishnews.com/article/metrowest/bnai-israel-congregants-do-tzedaka-in-kentucky