With three young children in tow, including one seven-month old in a harness, she examined a box of corn flakes and then moved on to get some crackers, watercress and green beans.

Just another family trip to the grocery store?  Hardly.

This single mother is in her 30’s and is among the millions of people across the country who are food insecure.  Whatever income and assistance she gets is not enough for her to feed herself and her family.

“This place is helping to keep me and my children fed and healthy because I can’t afford to on my own,” she said, asking that her name stay private. “I am here every week.  I’m not sure what I would do without it.  It is a blessing.”

Her destination is the Interfaith Food Pantry of the Oranges (IFPO) – a Good People Fund grantee – housed three Wednesday mornings each month at the Church of the Epiphany and Christ Church in Orange, NJ.

The organization supplies a wide array of food and other items, like toiletries, that make a huge difference in the lives of hundreds of individuals and families in Orange and East Orange, outside of New York City.

From its beginnings about 25 years ago, when it served about 10 clients per week, IFPO has grown tremendously and now boasts staggering numbers, reflecting the need and the organization’s ability to meet it with community partnerships and the Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

In 2018 alone, IFPO’s food and services reached an estimated 18,000 adults, 2,200 seniors and 15,500 children, and about 300 people visit each week.

“There is wealth in this area, but just a mile up the road are people in real need,” said Andy Soloway of nearby Maplewood, one of about 500 volunteers for the organization.  “That’s why we are here.”

This is so much more than a food-giveaway program, though, and one merely needs to walk through it one day to realize that IFPO has grabbed the best elements of marketplace, community center, social hall and farmer’s market, tied it all up with proven practices of customer service, and created one big, bustling and boisterous venue for giving and receiving good.

Living here is an intense respect for the dignity of those who come. They walk from table to table, each piled high with various foodstuffs – grains here, proteins there, vegetables too – so they can actively examine and choose products while engaging with volunteers who can go on about everything from preparation and recipes, to nutritional value and storage.

“We are a community of volunteers focused and committed to helping our neighbors in need with as much grace as we can possibly provide,” said Jodi Cooperman, a volunteer pantry manager and IFPO Treasurer.

“By greeting them, welcoming them by name, escorting and helping them, we are making their experience as good as it can be, making them as individuals feel valued and respected, and building a community of caring and dignity.   And they, in turn, are that much more grateful and appreciative.  It’s just so important.”

And the concept of “client choice” – by which clients choose only the products they like and need and that fit their lifestyles and health profiles – cuts down on food waste, which may occur in more traditional programs that distribute pre-packaged bags of groceries.

Congregating around one table on a recent Wednesday, clients were choosing an allotment of toiletry products, ranging from body gels and shampoos, to mouthwashes and deodorants.  This particular station, which exists due to a grant from The Good People Fund, is just as critical as the ones devoted to food, Cooperman noted.

“We all feel more dignity and self-worth when we feel clean,” she said, noting that federal food assistance programs such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) don’t cover the cost of toiletries.  “These are essentials.  Why should people have to choose between food and toothpaste?  We don’t want them to have to.”

IFPO is a collaborative effort of three synagogues and one church in the area. Volunteers are also drawn from other faith communities, as well as schools and civic groups, underscoring the power of the many to uplift those who may be struggling.

One Wednesday morning, a group of volunteer adults with special needs – from ECLC (Education, Careers and Lifelong Community), based in Chatham – were helping IFPO clients at the toiletries station underwritten by GPF.

In the process of doing good work and helping others with needs, these volunteers were learning real life skills themselves, part of a cycle of benevolence and nourishment that touches everyone associated with IFPO.

“I don’t count the hours or the days,” said one. “I come for the joy.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

As the year 2019 approaches in but a few hours, we are so excited to receive the following email from Lilach Tzur Ben-Moshe, founder of Yotsrot, which uses vocational training, particularly as it relates to the fashion world, to help women leave prostitution and regain economic stability. Lilach, along with many others including our grantee, Rabbi Levi Lauer, founder of ATZUM, have worked tirelessly to end this scourge:

Hi Naomi,

Happy new year to you and to your family! May it be wonderful!

Just a second before the new year enters, history was made – the Knesset passed the law prohibiting the purchase of sex, and referring budget for rehabilitation. I’m so proud to be part of the great group of women, activists, PMs and prostitution survivors who made it happen against all odds. I know that women will still be sold in prostitution but today Israel said with out a doubt that this is wrong, harmful and inhuman. So today I’m proud to be an Israeli.
Thank you for all of your support in this miracle. 2019 is a bit happier indeed.
Lilach

We at the Good People Fund are proud of the support we have offered on behalf of our donors to make this law a reality. It was well past time!

She wore a colorful headscarf and a broad smile greeting her guests one recent afternoon, inviting them to sit and enjoy chocolates set out on her small kitchen table.

Meet Irene Filo. She just turned 108. She lives in a small apartment in New York’s Morningside Heights. She uses a walker to move her slight frame about. She has no family. A live-in caregiver tends to her physical needs.

Irene is at a point in life when frailties, illnesses, memories and limited support can lead to an isolation and loneliness and longing so great as to be devastating to wellbeing and survival.

So it’s no surprise that she welcomed her visitors from LiLY (Lifeforce in Later Years) – a grantee of The Good People Fund – with such natural joy, care and anticipation. In very real ways, they are her connection to community, humanity and life.

LiLY creates that connection for about 100 elderly persons in Morningside Heights, a diverse and vibrant neighborhood that includes Columbia University, but where seniors living in relative isolation – some at or near the poverty line – can easily disappear.

“Just like anyone, they need validation and support and purpose and to feel valued,” said Irene Zola, LiLY’s founder and executive director. “They are too often not getting that. It’s tragic.”

Zola founded LiLY in 2009, shortly after the death of her mother and exposures to the nursing home system and its deficiencies, including undertrained and overworked staff often unable to dispense adequate and informed care.

Realizing that most seniors prefer to remain at home as long as possible, and that many in fact do, she moved to create a neighborhood organization devoted to supporting this often-forgotten population for no charge.

So she set up a card table on the sidewalk of a busy street and began recruiting volunteers. Today, LiLY has built a corps of about 100 people in Morningside Heights serving a near equal amount of seniors there.

The spectrum of volunteer interactions is wide, from friendly home visits and walks together, to helping with paperwork, escorting to doctor visits, making connections to professionals and services, and going to the pharmacy or grocery store for needed items.

The Good People Fund supports LiLY with a grant that helps pay for a social worker who connects seniors to services and resources beyond LiLY’s scope, helps families with care issues, and runs support groups.

“I have had some perfectly wonderful people come see me,” said a 97-year-old senior in the LiLY network. “It is good to know there are such people around. I thought they all died in a fire or something!”

LiLY calls its initiative in the neighborhood “Morningside Village,” a name that captures its very unique qualities creating community in not only name, but in practice. Most volunteers come from within the immediate neighborhood, for instance, sharing common points of reference and such with the seniors they visit and help.

“People are being connected in ways they wouldn’t be otherwise,” Zola said. “We may run into each other on the street while out taking walks or going to the doctor. It is like a small village.”

The success of Morningside Heights Village has been replicated elsewhere by LiLY. An initiative further east, called West Harlem Neighbors, began in 2016 and now involves about 25 local volunteers helping about 50 elderly persons.  And in upstate New York, LiLY formed community partnerships to create the Catskill Neighbors program, through which about 25 volunteers are helping a nearly equal number of seniors there.

Zola has moved LiLY into the advocacy field as well.  The organization is the force behind Celebrate Our Elders Week, marked at the beginning of October and recognized by the mayor of New York City and the state legislature of New York through official proclamations.

The purpose of such a public campaign, Zola said, is to ensure that seniors in our communities are not forgotten, but recognized, seen, and even honored, and that their needs are understood, acknowledged and supported.  LiLY has worked with the New York City Department of Education to create activities such as letter writing to elders and inviting them to visit schools.

“We want to kill ageism early in life,” Zola said, “and ensure that young people grow up honoring and respecting seniors.”

LiLY’s volunteer-driven program has immediate trickle down effects beyond the seniors themselves. If a family caregiver exists – and often one does not – home visits or errand running by LiLY volunteers can relieve very real stresses and conflicts.

“If I know that a LiLY volunteer is coming on Tuesday, then I know that I can leave and take the day to myself,” said Genia Gould, who stopped working and moved into her father’s Morningside Heights apartment to take care of him and his daily affairs. “For him, the visits are a vitamin. For me, they open time to take care of myself.”

Recently, LiLY volunteers, clients and others gathered at an annual luncheon.  Among them was Irene Filo.

Being that her birthday was close, everyone sang her a rousing “Happy Birthday” in celebration of her life, her friendship, and her indomitable spirit.

Her smile was as wide as it was that other afternoon, when LiLY volunteers came knocking on her door for a visit over chocolates.

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

It’s been more than a year since Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico. In the interim, how many other hurricanes have created crisis and despair in their aftermath? Sadly, this is becoming an all too-familiar scenario.

But–in Puerto Rico, circumstances were even graver, with the loss of the entire power grid leaving millions with neither electricity nor safe housing. Erika Velez and her all-volunteer Puerto Rico Lit organization are still working in remote areas, and recently completed construction of ten new wooden homes in Toa Alta. Just yesterday, this new refrigerator, one of four The Good People Fund underwrote, was delivered to a family with young kids and a seriously ill family member. Imagine what life is  like with a working refrigerator!

A call today from a trusted source served as a reminder of the special significance of the month of Elul, traditionally a time of reflection as we approach the Jewish New Year.

The story involves a young adolescent girl raised in a rigidly observant, religious environment devoid of love and compassion. To escape this personal hell, she entered another form of hell and turned to the streets working in prostitution for several years.

Eventually she became known to an Israeli organization working to end prostitution and in time began to volunteer with them, ultimately leaving the streets to start a new life helping other girls in similar situations.

Through her essays and personal interviews she is deemed a serious and capable student. Inspired by her volunteer work, she will return to school next month to study social work.

Through the generosity of our donors we will be able to help her with this worthy pursuit and, as the new year begins, seek to save one more life from the predations of exploitation and suffering.

It wasn’t easy, because the orchard was on a sloping hillside carpeted by loose dirt.  So keeping footing while plucking apricots from ripening trees was a challenge.

But the dozen-plus volunteers who showed up in late June to harvest this orchard were as dexterous and balanced as they were committed and focused.

“If it has some color on it, then pick it,” one veteran volunteer told a newcomer. “Each one we get is one that would have gone to waste if we weren’t here.”

And in just a few hours, over 700 pounds of the luscious fruit had been picked, boxed and hauled off to food agencies for quick distribution to people in need – an estimated 1,400 from this one day alone.

The late-afternoon pick, which continued toward dusk, was a snapshot of the work and impact of Village Harvest.  It’s a San Jose-based non-profit organization dedicated to gathering the bounty of fruit growing in backyards and small orchards and getting it into the hands and onto the plates of those who may be going without.

The area around San Jose – including Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz and San Benito Counties, where Village Harvest is active – is one of the most verdant in the country and boasts an agricultural history and spirit that is legendary.   It is rare for suburban properties here not to have a fruit tree or two, and many larger estates have full orchards conserved by owners.

Such is the case where this particular apricot harvest took place.  Nestled on an estate high in Los Altos Hills, with sweeping views of the Bay Area, an orchard with about 80 apricot trees was bearing fruit at peak season.  But for Village Harvest and its volunteer corps, much – if not all of it – would have gone to waste.

“Many property owners here are well aware of the history of this region, so they don’t want to plow down these trees, but they don’t want to be farmers either,” said Craig Diserens, Village Harvest’s executive director.  “That is where we step in.”

Volunteers harvest fruit of all sorts – from apricots and pears, to apples, oranges and lemons – at no less than 600 homes and 30 orchards throughout the year.

All this work makes a hefty impact on many pressing societal challenges, like hunger, poverty and healthy eating for vulnerable populations.  In 2017 alone, volunteers picked 225,000 pounds of fresh fruit, which translated to 600,000 servings of healthy food for tens of thousands of people in the community.

The Good People Fund, which makes food rescue and the alleviation of hunger a priority, has supported Village Harvest with grants to help cover the costs of harvesting and development of a directory of produce donation locations.

Diserens, a former computer hardware designer and R&D manager who also worked at high-tech start-ups, described Village Harvest as an “accidental organization,” founded more organically than purposefully, but developing and growing in reach and impact since its first harvest in 2001.   He recalled how a local 4-H chapter approached his wife at the time, a Master Gardener, for advice on where to locate fruit to make jam.

“We realized there was infinitely more around us than anyone would ever need to make jam,” he said.  “It was more of a sense of recognizing abundance around us and wanting to put it to good use to help people.”

Village Harvest now relies on Diserens’ strategic and visionary acumen honed in Silicon Valley, and the sweat of 1,200 volunteers from throughout the community who in total contribute about 12,000 hours of work each year.  Their purposes are varied, from those passionate about food waste and poverty, and those who are interested in gardening, to those who want to be outdoors doing something useful and social, and parents who come with their children to instill an appreciation for hard work and the earth.

For volunteer Sue Godfrey of nearby Los Altos, the June apricot picking marked her 40th event with Village Harvest.  Her first, three years ago, was with her son as part of a high school service league project, one of many community partnerships that Village Harvest has forged since its founding.

“It is doing good while getting good exercise and being very social,” she said.  “And as volunteers, we get to bring home some of the fruit that is damaged and not good for distribution.  I’ve done a lot with plums.”

The community-building power of Village Harvest has grown as a reflection of the organization’s work.  In fact, “strengthen our community” is part of the heading on its website.

Beyond the camaraderie among volunteers joined in a food justice activity, workshops and resources are available covering everything from fruit tree care and gardening, to making preserves and pruning.

Back at the staging area at the edge of the orchard, volunteers were examining apricots and separating out ones damaged or not fully ripe, ensuring the highest quality shipments to community service and food agencies that form Village Harvest’s distribution chain.

“Every community should have a Village Harvest of its own,” said Diserens, as he looked over the bounty. “What abundance they tap into may vary, but the sense of community spirit and doing good is the same, and so inspiring.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund