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

 

Medical Clowns Bringing Good People Together: Humanitarian Mission Takes

 

WOODMERE, NY, Jun 03 (MARKET WIRE) —
The Good People Fund in collaboration with Lev Leytzan’s Medical Clowns,
NJ’s Congregation Bnai Israel and the Redistribution Center of Denver,
join forces to bring material as well as moral support to the rural
Appalachian community of McRoberts, Kentucky.

The Good People Fund, a N.J.-based organization that supports small
grass-roots organizations is excited to spear-head their return to
McRoberts for a second year from June 6th – June 9th. The Good People
Fund provides financial support, guidance and mentoring to organizations
that help relieve poverty, disability, trauma and social isolation. The
organization is expanding its efforts this year with the addition of Lev
Leytzan: The Compassionate Clown Alley, Inc. Lev Leytzan (Hebrew for “The
Heart of the Clown”) is embarking on its first such effort in the U.S.
after nearly a dozen successful humanitarian missions to Europe and
Israel.

Naomi Eisenberger, Executive Director of the Good People Fund, is
passionate about this mission that highlights the extreme poverty and
lack of resources in what is described as the poorest region of the
United States. The Fund is proud to unite forces with several nonprofits,
each infusing the mission with their unique talents and services further
highlighting the importance of collaborating to work together towards
common good.

Lev Leytzan has shared its unique style of therapeutic clowning with
underserved populations around New York and across the world, including
communities of Holocaust survivors and residents of orphanages, hospitals
and nursing homes,” said Dr. Neal C. Goldberg, Founder and Director of
Lev Leytzan. “We are honored to participate in the Good People Fund’s
mission to McRoberts, a wonderful demonstration of the impact that
humanitarian-focused organizations, regardless of size, can have when
they work together.”

An integral part of the mission to McRoberts includes the delivery and
distribution of a trailer full of house wares, furnishings, appliances,
and home and school supplies donated by Ranya Kelly through her
Redistribution Center, as well as a trailer-load of food donated by the
Youngstown Community Food Bank in Youngstown, Ohio.

The Good People Fund, a N.J.-based non-profit founded in 2008, supports
small, grass-roots organizations primarily in the United States and
Israel. They provide a unique and personal approach to giving, disburse
the funds they receive with minimal bureaucracy and overhead, and prove
daily that any sum of money can change lives.

Founded in 2004 by Dr. Neal C. Goldberg, Lev Leytzan: The Compassionate
Clown Alley, Inc. has been training teens and young adults in the art of
medical clowning and spreading joy and laughter to thousands of children
and elderly in the New York area and in Israel. Dr. Goldberg, a child
psychologist who treats children, teens, and adults, provides his clowns
with opportunities to gain self-confidence and compassion at a young age
through their abilities to entertain and cheer the sick and elderly.

Contact:
Beth Friedlander
Director of Lev Leytzan’s Ambassador Program
516-509-6132
beth_friedlander@post.harvard.edu

Naomi Eisenberger
Executive Director
Good People Fund
973-761-0580
Naomi@goodpeoplefund.org
www.goodpeoplefund.org

Copyright 2010, Market Wire, All rights reserved.

Read the orginal article athttp://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/03/idUS183754+03-Jun-2010+MW20100603

 

The Good People Fund was incorporated in January 2008 and began operating officially in April of that year. Prior to this, I had been very involved in Danny Siegel’s Ziv Tzedakah Fund for more than 16 years, serving the organization as Managing Director for more than ten of those years. When Danny decided to retire and opted to close the Fund I, and several Ziv supporters, felt that there was still a critical need for the type of giving opportunities and philosophy that that organization represented. Much like Ziv, the Good People Fund supports either individuals or very small organizations (many volunteer-run) that are engaged in Tikkun Olam (repairing the world) in Israel and the United States. Although the primary focus is on directly relieving hunger, poverty and suffering, some of these small organizations also have creative ideas for systemic change but they are just getting off the ground and need seed funding. Because these small organizations have very low overhead, the dollars donated stretch very far and have maximum impact. I am the Fund’s only employee and my salary is paid by designated gifts, thus allowing donations to us to flow through to the people who need the help with very little diverted for administrative overhead.)

I think that before we can talk more about the Good People Fund, we need some background on Danny and how the Ziv Tzedakah Fund got started.

Ziv Tzedakah Fund began more than 35 years ago when Danny Siegel, a writer and poet, traveled to Israel. As is the custom, friends and family gave him tzedakah money to give away when he arrived in the Holy Land. When he arrived, he began to look for the “good people” who were working quietly on behalf of others. He met individuals like Myriam Mendilow, who took in many poor elderly immigrants and gave them a warm meal and a place to use their talents to produce crafts reflecting their backgrounds. Myriam’s work was called Lifeline for the Old or Yad L’Kashish. It can still be found in downtown Jerusalem today. He also met others like Hadassah Levi, who had rescued 40 Down Syndrome babies from local hospitals and was raising them in Maon LaTinok.

The tzedakah money he brought with him was distributed to people like Myriam and Hadassah and upon returning home to the States Danny wrote a short report to those who had given him money, explaining where he had donated it. That was Ziv’s beginning and eventually Danny incorporated and Ziv Tzedakah Fund became a legal entity that collected and distributed funds to small, grass-roots programs in both Israel and the United States. Common to all of them was the individual or small group, Danny referred to them as Mitzvah Heroes, who devoted themselves to Tikkun Olam (repairing the world) in very quiet and simple ways. For many years, Danny worked on his own with no staff nor overhead.

Where and when did you come in?
I met Danny in 1991, when I was about to be installed as president of my synagogue here in NJ. My rabbi had offered me a few of Danny’s early books to read and I was captured by his philosophy and teachings about how we can all use our talents to make a difference. The rabbi and I decided to invite Danny to be our scholar-in-residence and after the weekend he spent with us, we formed our own social action committee within the synagogue and began to do our own good work. One of the things Danny did when he was with us was to challenge us to sell one of the many sifrei Torahs [Torah scrolls] we had and to use the proceeds for tzedakah work. Danny had offered that challenge to many congregations where he spoke but no one actually came through. Our board voted to sell not one, but two (we had an abundance) and, with that money, began an endowment which today still provides funds which are donated each year to several projects.

I guess that when Danny saw that I could convince a board to do this, he thought I might be interested in working for Ziv as a volunteer and asked me if I had a “few hours” a week I could devote to the organization. I was thrilled and from those “few hours,” I eventually became the organization’s volunteer administrator. The organization began to grow and, with a change in my circumstances, I eventually became Ziv’s part-time and then full-time Managing Director, with funds for my salary being donated by individuals specifically for that purpose.

I don’t think the readers have any idea of the scope of Ziv by the time Danny retired recently. In the early days,he collected random, small donations from friends and neighbors that he funneled to small, grassroots efforts, essentially run on a shoestring, by people finding ways to “do good.” Giving to Danny and Ziv was an alternative for those who disliked donating to big organizations with big overhead. By the time Ziv folded last year, the fund had become a major funder for many grass roots organizations, both in Israel and here in America. Ziv disbursed how much over the last 35 years?

$13,630,615.91

Yikes. That’s a goodly sum! And a hard act to follow. Let’s talk about the Good People Fund. Can you tell us about some of your more local efforts? Give our readers a sense of these little projects and what support from GPF can do.

When we began the Good People Fund, we wanted to continue to work with many of the same programs that Ziv was involved with but we also wanted to expand our scope and search for other new “good people” who were working quietly and effectively on behalf of others.

Some of the new programs we have started working with…

About 6 months ago, a friend told me about a woman named Randi Cairns who was the wife of a National Guardsman who had returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan as well as another part of the world. Guardsmen and their families have unique problems…they do not live on military bases and therefore do not have the support system regular army families have. While her husband was deployed, Randi raised their four children on her own and had to deal with many, many difficult situations. She once shared the story of how she was 8 months pregnant, had a broken leg and had to take her three other children with her while she shopped at the supermarket…that was one of her “lighter moments.” There were many other situations that were challenging and extraordinarily difficult to deal with.

Though her husband has returned, he can still be called to active duty and Randi, recalling her own difficulties, decided to begin Homefront Hearts, a non-profit that provides advocacy and resources to families of soldiers serving their country. When I first spoke to her, I asked her how we could help. She jokingly referred to her desk chair, which was being held together with one screw, and her printer, which only worked when she hit it in a certain way. Before she knew it, we had her at Staples buying a new chair and printer so she could do her good work with a little more comfort and less stress. Since that time, Randi has directed us to some very sad situations involving wounded soldiers and their families whose needs are not being met by other entities. No matter what one feels about the ongoing war in Iraq or the deployment of soldiers to Afghanistan, many have families with needs that are not being cared for.

For Randi and others, the GPF can provide not only monetary support but they know that we are available for mentoring, moral support, a shoulder to cry on when things get frustrating, practical advice — we do it all.

Recently, we provided funds for a small local social service agency, (run by volunteers) which had been overwhelmed with increased requests for help with utility bills and mortgage payments.

Again, on the local level, we discovered a small organization that was started by one woman who was hearing stories of residents who could not pay their electric bills or a father who had lost his job due to illness and was foregoing much needed medicine so that he could put food on his family’s table. The founder could not believe this was happening in a town known for its affluence, but upon investigation, learned that these stories and many others were true. She began her organization, Down the Block, and we have given her funds for some of the cases and have also spent time with her discussing strategy and growth. We are a unique resource for small programs, which so often were begun by a visionary with little non-profit or business knowledge — only a passion for changing what is wrong.

We know that many times we can make a tremendous difference in the lives of untold numbers of people and often it takes very little to make that happen. As we like to say, there is no such thing as a “small mitzvah”…we can take a small sum of money and make miracles happen with it.

These programs sound terrific and so much needed. Does someone have to be wealthy in order to help? And how do people find out about the Good People Fund and follow your work?

What is truly unique about the GPF is that we have developed the art of taking small sums of money and doing truly important and meaningful things with it. That is not to say that we don’t have or need donors with larger sums of money! The needs are huge and today, resources are so much more limited. We have $18 donors and $50,000 donors – each knows that funds we receive will transform lives in many different ways and do it in the most direct way possible. I like to use the following to best describe what we do – it is like taking the hand of the donor and placing it in the hand of the recipient with neither knowing the other’s identity.

Since we are a new organization, we are working very hard to get the word out about our work. We believe that we offer something that most other non-profits do not – a meaningful way to make a difference in the most direct way possible. Our website, www.goodpeoplefund.org, is a good way to learn more about what we do. To get an even clearer picture, there is a link on the homepage to what we call our “tzedakah diaries.” The diaries are short stories I share about our work and how we were able to use donations for a specific need. I came up with the idea to write them because so many people, when they ask about our work, are always taken with the stories and want to hear more. The stories are heart-warming and inspiring, for the most part, and produce a natural flow of endorphins when you hear them. (Which is why I do not look at what I do as “work”… It feels way too good to be work!) The best way people can help us is to spread the word of our work and visit our site to learn more.

Sounds great. For those of our readers unfamiliar with the terms, can you please flesh out what Tikkun Olam and Tzedakah are and how they are a critical part of the Good People Fund and your work?

Tikkun Olam is a Hebrew term which means “to repair the world.” We believe that each of us has, within us, the ability to heal or repair the world, using our own unique talents and abilities, in many ways, both big and small. Sometimes, we can do it with money and sometimes we can do it with our talents or skills. Think, perhaps, of a young man named Max Wallack who, at the age of 13, decided to collect puzzles that he then distributed to nursing homes. Max learned, in a deeply personal way, that puzzles can be very therapeutic for people with early Alzheimer’s. Now, only one year later, Max has collected thousands of puzzles, distributed them to nursing homes around his home and in other parts of the country, built an informative and attractive web site to tell his story, and used his exceptional intelligence to form a non-profit organization.

By his actions and using his talents and skills, he has encouraged others to do the same. Heaven knows, there are millions of ways in which we can repair the world…it does need fixing…and within each of us there is some spark, some talent to make it happen. The GPF looks for and assists people who are actively engaged in Tikkun Olam in both big and small ways.

Tzedakah is somewhat more difficult to define since it is so often misidentified as “charity.” Tzedakah comes from the Hebrew root, tzedek, which means justice or righteousness. As Jews, we have an obligation to give tzedakah or funds in order to create a more just world where hungry people are fed, poor people are provided with what they need to live a good and decent life, the environment is treated with respect, sick people are healed, and so on. The GPF is a tzedakah fund and being a “fund”, as opposed to a foundation is very important. We work simply, money comes in and money goes out with a minimum of bureaucracy and a maximum of transparency and oversight.

Now–despite the fact that the GPF is founded on Jewish principles, we work with and support both Jewish programs and secular programs. Good People do not have religious boundaries.

I’m sure any and all donations are especially welcome during this holiday season. Anything you’d like to add, Naomi?

The GPF is proud of what we can accomplish operating the way that we do. We would be honored to act on behalf of additional donors who may now know about our work and would like their donations to be used with the maximum impact. Please visit us on the web at www.goodpeoplefund.org and feel free to be in touch if you have questions about how we operate and how your donation can make a real difference.

Thank you for sharing the story of the Good People Fund with us. Good luck with your work!

Read the orginal article at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Making-a-Difference–Talk-by-Joan-Brunwasser-091221-451.html