Illustrations by Zach O’Hora

Tis The Reason

In these times, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations get hit hard.

by Philadelphia Weekly Editorial Staff

’Tis the Reason

The day after Barack Hussein Obama was declared 44th president of the United States, spirits were high.

Maureen Dowd wrote a column in The New York Times about the fact that white people were running around asking black people how they felt about the election. She guiltily admitted she did it herself; when she asked her mailman, he looked at her with “bemused disdain.”

Jon Stewart joked that people were actually making eye contact in New York City, even on the subway.

Philadelphians, flush with pride after a World Series win and a strong swing-state showing, were jubilant. People on SEPTA transport of all kinds were smiling, high- fiving and talking excitedly about the next four years. People proudly sported their “I Voted for Change” stickers, and waited for the inevitable street-hawking of T-shirts showing Obama in a Phillies cap.

And yet, on Nov. 6, things were essentially back to normal, at least in Philly. When a woman holding a baby was unable to high-five a passing guy about the World Series (because she was holding the baby), he called her a bitchface.

Interracial squabbling returned to normal on SEPTA, and car horns stopped beeping in joy and solidarity and returned to blasting with punitive irritation.

Ah, Philly. How quickly the silver tarnishes.

The quick shift in mood almost certainly had to do with a reality that Obama was all too aware of, having won the election based on its grinding fact: The economy is simply awful. Recession, depression—whatever it is, if we could dig up Franklin D. Roosevelt and prop him in a Rascal right now we probably would.

There are obvious casualties of an economic downturn—children have less to eat, jobs dry up, homes lose value, people are forced to leave what they know and venture into the unknown.

The last thing they want to do, between job searches and panic attacks, is send money to a charity. Membership drives make people homicidal; I have an umbrella already, thanks. What I don’t have is a job.

In these times, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations get hit hard. Charity is seen as a luxury, and donations—along with magazine subscriptions—are the first thing to go. In Saturday’s New York Times, M.P. Dunleavy wrote, “The fallout from the financial crisis is striking nonprofit groups and charities fast and hard. As much as people might like to sit still until their own finances feel stable again, many nonprofit agencies need additional support now.”

That’s because needs for services surge when the economy is bad. “We have seen an increased need from people who are facing foreclosure, job loss and decreased work hours,” the Rev. Michael M. Boland, chief executive of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago, told Dunleavy. “We have seen an increase in the number of requests for our emergency services, which include food pantries and hot dinners for the hungry and homeless.”

When you decide to be Charitable despite your hardships, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start, and for which cause. And many people think giving to charities is only about money, which then makes them retreat, with a guilty shrug.

Fortunately, you can give meaningfully without opening your wallet. For this year’s holiday guide, PW decided to focus on nine charities that we strongly feel deserve your time or attention or—hell, if you’ve got it—your money.

We start with a feature on the Philadelphia Student Union, an organization founded by Philadelphia public high school kids who got fed up with being at the whims of the School District. Their remarkable story is told by college student Becca Trabin, who was so inspired by what these kids are trying to do, she absolutely insisted we feature them at length.

The other eight charities are no less worthy, but we tried to make it easy for you: some brief stats and ways to get involved. We hope you’ll feel they’re worth your attention.

If you have suggestions for other charities or nonprofits, please send them to feedback@philadelphiaweekly.com or post them to www.philadelphiaweekly.com. We’d like this to be an ongoing, living project that people can access throughout the holiday season.

Is Our Children Learning?

One worthy nonprofit empowers Philadelphia students to fight for a better education.

Last month 22 students from Sayre High School in West Philly were arrested after an in-school “brawl” with police. Online news reports about the incident filled up with comments from readers calling the students “crack babies” and “animals,” and suggesting that their uniforms be orange jumpsuits.

Seventeen-year-old Candace Carter is a senior at Sayre and a member of the Philadelphia Student Union. “I’m not a crack baby and I’m not a crack whore,” she says. “My name is Candace Carter. You can call me by my name.”

She and other Student Union members led a protest at Sayre, calling on school officials to demand that the police officers, who students say incited the violence, be forced to undergo training in deescalation techniques.

“Police came into the school beating kids with Tasers and nightsticks,” Carter says. “There was an incident between one student and one police officer—you didn’t need 50 police officers to come in and beat on students who had nothing to do with it. I’ve never seen 50 police officers in my life.”

The intensification of punitive measures taken in public schools is just one of many social issues about which the Student Union aims to educate students in an effort to arm them against what they call “the spiral of oppression.”

Dan Jones, a Student Union member and junior at Masterman High School, has taken after-school lessons at the Student Union’s small West Philly office. “Schools are already preparing a lot of people to enter the prison-industrial complex,” he says, “or to go to the military or work jobs that make money for people who are already wealthy.”

Although Jones is only 16, his 20 hours-per-week commitment to the Student Union has made him hyperarticulate on the subject of grassroots organizing.

“A lot of what we do is based around political education and leadership development,” he says. “We talk about racism, militarism, oppression, young people’s oppression, education theory and media theory.”

The Student Union was founded in 1995 when a group of students in the Philadelphia School District became concerned about the quality of their education and decided they wanted to have a say in District decisions. It’s now part of the Media Mobilizing Project, a nonprofit that works to give voice to members of society left out of the media-making process.

One of the Student Union’s biggest fights has been blocking efforts to hand public schools over to corporations—no easy feat in the wake of No Child Left Behind. Passed in 2001, the act forces a school that fails to make “adequate yearly progress” to convert into a charter school, privatize or find an alternative means of restructuring. The Office of Restructuring Schools (ORS) was founded in 2002 to prevent schools in trouble from being bought by private Educational Management Organizations, or EMOs.

The ORS’ efforts were successful, says Dan Jones, but it was shuttered by the District in 2005. “The Office of Restructured Schools didn’t fit with the District’s agenda, even though those schools were making the biggest gains in any school district.”

The executive director of the Student Union is 32-year-old activist Nijmie Dzurinko, who received a university fellowship from Temple in 2006 while earning her master’s in Urban Studies. Dzurinko says, “If the ORS is outperforming the EMOs, what’s the point of spending $107 million in contract fees on EMOs—which is how much they’ve spent in the last five years. The agenda of privatization has shifted over time, partly because of us, and we’ve pushed for more accountability and made it a public issue.”

This year the Student Union worked with other organizations under the Philadelphia Cross-City Campaign for School Reform to prevent more schools from being taken over.

“There were 70 schools that were [considered for] privatizing, so we did a lot of organizing work to push back against that,” says Jones. “We did an action the day before Valentine’s Day called the Love Affair Is Over, where we blocked traffic on Broad and Spring Garden in the shape of a heart and then broke it because the love affair was over between the District and the EMOs.”

Although they’ve made serious gains in preventing privatization, the Student Union still has to work tirelessly to ensure basic rights of Philadelphia students. They feel that, for the most part, new District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman ignores their attempts at dialogue.

“When we brought Arlene Ackerman to our schools,” Carter says, “we talked about the important things—teacher quality, Corrective Action II—stuff like that. Nothing about bathrooms or anything else. But Overbrook just put in new bathrooms.”

A new bathroom seems a luxury when students in the Philadelphia School District still receive a disproportionately low amount of “highly qualified” teachers. Those teachers who are sent to their schools are given few incentives and resources to help them stay.

“The community knows what should happen inside schools, but they don’t have anywhere to go about it,” says Greg Jordan-Detamore, a junior at Masterman. “The District holds their meetings at 10 a.m., when everyone’s working.”

Eric Yates is a senior at West Philadelphia High School and a Student Union member of three years. “I feel like I’ve been told all my life I can do anything, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really have a choice,” he says. “There are certain things I’ve been set out for. Our schools don’t even prepare students to be outspoken or intelligent members of society. It’s upsetting to know that I have to go out and get it myself.”

Becca Trabin is a Temple student who last wrote about the Great Schlep. The Student Union accepts donations for retreats, summer programs, office space and subway tokens and food for students.

Charitable Living

Eight organizations that deserve our support, even in tough times.

Books Through Bars

Philadelphia location: 4722 Baltimore Ave.
Year established: 1989
Website: booksthroughbars.org
Name of Philadelphia-based executive/years in position: Lindsay Liprando/four years
Stated purpose: “We believe a society of social and economic inequality leads to a cycle of crime and incarceration. We work to reverse the dehumanizing effects excessive punishment inflicts upon individuals, families and communities. Books Through Bars sends quality reading material to prisoners and encourages creative dialogue on the criminal justice system, thereby educating those living inside and outside of prison walls.”
Annual operating budget: Between $38,000 and $39,000 in 2007
Are donations tax deductible?: Financial contributions are always tax deductible. Book donations are only tax deductible if the books are used by the organization. (Books unfit for donation—due to damage or topic—are given to local thrift stores.)
Volunteers needed for: Reading letters, choosing books from the BTB library and packaging and mailing books.
Why Books Through Bars deserves our support: Because everyone deserves an education. If you’d like to support the organization’s mission, there are some restrictions. BTB prefers paperback and won’t consider hardback fiction. They don’t want genre fiction or anything too old or out of date. What BTB does want: dictionaries (both Spanish and English), GED and ESL study guides, classics, high school and introductory college texts, African-American, Mexican and Puerto Rican histories, books on spirituality, yoga and meditation and information about drug and alcohol addiction recovery. BTB maintains these standards because the goal is to promote betterment throughout the prison system. The nonprofit—which didn’t take shape as an organization until 2000—collects, packages and donates these materials to prisons in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Virginia and West Virginia.

Calcutta House

Philadelphia location: 1601 W. Girard Ave.
Year established: 1987
Website: calcuttahouse.org
Name of chief executive/years in position: Matther Teter/appointed in September. (Former executive director: Steve Peura/eight and a half years.)
Stated purpose: “Calcutta House exists to serve the most fragile people with AIDS and to support the self-empowerment of each person to live as fully as their situation permits. We provide supportive housing with services responsive to the individual: those who are dying, those who are able to rebuild their lives and move on to independence, and those who will continue to require the assistance of supportive housing. We work with each person to progress toward his/her potential and to achieve attainable and realistic goals.”
Annual operating budget: $1.8 million
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes
Volunteers needed for: Office/clerical work, accompanying residents to appointments, recreational activities with residents, visiting for emotional/spiritual support, preparing meals, arts and crafts with residents, life skills/literacy training, gardening and driving.
Why this charity deserves our support: Calcutta House has provided services to the most underserved in our community for more than 20 years. They provide care to the homeless living with HIV/AIDS, many of whom have had little support throughout their lives. Volunteers at Calcutta House provide not only physical aid to the people living there but also emotional comfort. Kim McGrory, Calcutta House’s deputy executive director, says that volunteers are an integral part of the experience and the existence of the organization. “These people need to know that they are not a lost group to society,” McGrory says. With no family of their own, the staff, social workers and volunteers become an extended family. They depend on the support of volunteers. “We offer support and services,” McGrory adds, “but there’s nothing more important than the human touch.”

Cradles to Crayons: The Giving Factory

Philadelphia location: 141 Gibraltar Rd., Horsham, Pa.
Year established: In Philadelphia, August 2007. (The original started in Boston in 2002.)
Website: cradlestocrayons.org
Name of chief Philadelphia-based executive/years in position: Jennifer Case/founder
Stated purpose: To provide, free of charge, low-income and homeless children from birth to 12 the basic essentials they need to be safe, warm, ready to learn and valued.
Annual operating budget: $500,000
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes, both cash and products.
Volunteers needed for: To donate directly, host a drive or spend an afternoon sorting and packing donations in the 8,400-square-foot clubhouse. To facilitate hosting, Cradles to Crayons provides a turnkey kit of fliers, email blasts and a huge collection bin. The warehouse accommodates up to 80 people at a time, making it convenient for corporations and groups of friends to give back. Well-organized volunteer facilitation has been key to the organization’s success. At launch, Cradles fulfilled the orders of six organizations. Just 16 months later, 146 women’s shelters, hospitals and community centers rely on Cradles to deliver goods to nurture and value children displaced by poverty, illness and abuse.

Homeless Advocacy Project

Philadelphia location: 42 S. 15th St., fourth fl.
Year established: 1990
Website: homelessadvocacyproject.org
Name of chief Philadelphia-based executive/years in position: Marsha Cohen/11 years
Stated purpose: To provide free legal services to homeless individuals and families in Philadelphia.
Annual operating budget: $600,000
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes.
Volunteers needed for: Lawyers for legal work.
Why this charity deserves our support: Two-thirds of clients in local shelters are men and women—and their families—who have fallen on temporary hard times. The Homeless Advocacy Project provides legal assistance to such folks at Philadelphia’s 25 city-sponsored homeless shelters, helping them obtain state and federal medical, Social Security and veterans benefits that help them stabilize their lives. That, in turn, enables them to find employment and housing. “We are stabilizing individuals and families so they can get on their feet,” says Executive Director Marsha Cohen. Like other charities, though, the Homeless Advocacy Project is steeling itself for the effects of recession; Cohen figures that the demand for services is about to explode. But every dollar in the organization’s budget comes from private donors—including individuals and organizations taking a hit on the stock market right now. “It’s probably the worst of all scenarios,” Cohen says. “It’s the worst I’ve seen it since I’ve been involved.”

Project Great Potential

Philadelphia Location: Enterprise Center, 4548 Market St.
Year established: 1989
Website:theenterprisecenter.com
Name of chief Philadelphia-based executive/years in position:
Della Clark/president of the Enterprise Center, 16 years
Stated purpose: Project Great Potential works with young men in Philadelphia between 18 and 25 who are aspiring entrepreneurs. The program equips these young men with the resources necessary to succeed in the business world.
Annual operating budget: $66,000
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes.
Volunteers needed for: Program support, mentoring and outreach.
Why this charity deserves our support: Project Great Potential works with male high school graduates who have entrepreneurial ambitions but aren’t enrolled in college. During an eight-week program, students take business courses, are mentored and gain professional networking skills. The Enterprise Center staff is dedicated to preparing men for the business world. Monetary donations, books, laptops, electronics, suits and volunteers are needed. Outreach and referral to those who could benefit from the program is appreciated as well.

Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic

Philadelphia location: 215 W. Church Road, Suite 111, King of Prussia, Pa.
Year established: 1948
Website: rfbd.org
Name of chief Philadelphia-based executive/years in position: Bruce Haines/since April 2007
Stated purpose: To serve all people with “print disabilities”—those who can’t effectively read standard print because of a disability.
Annual operating budget, nationally: $60,902,049
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes.
Volunteers needed for: Reading, directing, editing, outreach and marking. Readers narrate the text of a book and describe any visual elements, such as charts, graphs, pictures, maps or mathematical equations. RFB&D is facing a shortage of specialized readers proficient in math, science, finance, accounting, computer science, foreign languages and other technical areas. They also are in need of volunteers to read general K-12 titles. Directors guide the reader by operating easy-to-use recording equipment and making corrections to the recorded material when needed. Editing: Digital Audio Editors review files during the production process. Educational Outreach volunteers spread the word at schools, community events and local conferences. Book Markers create a “pencil path” through books to be recorded, making notes to guide readers through the sequence of text, charts, illustrations and footnotes.
Why this charity deserves our support: For its 60th anniversary year, RFB&D is vastly expanding its outreach to war veterans, the population it was founded to benefit. Take the case of Michael Jernigan. He enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was 23, and went to Fallujah in 2004, where his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb. He was thrown 20 meters, 45 percent of his cranium was crushed, he lost both his eyes and he had to have his whole forehead replaced. When he emerged from a coma and learned he was blind, he went into a depression. He used to love to read, and was devastated by his lack of independence. But with RFB&D’s technology to “read” textbooks, he’s been able to go back to college to prepare for a career in international relations. He’s now a spokesperson for RFB&D, bringing awareness to the problem of visual impairment in vets due to blast injuries from IEDs.

Squash Smarts

Philadelphia locations: North Philadelphia: Lenfest Center, 3890 North 10th St. West Philadelphia: Drexel Athletic Center, 33rd and Market sts.
Year established: 2001
Website: squashsmarts.org
Name of chief Philadelphia-based executive/years in position: Stephen Gregg/four years
Stated purpose: Combines the sport of squash with academic tutoring and mentoring of underserved, urban youth in order to develop self-esteem and discipline through academic, athletic and personal achievement.
Annual operating budget: $606,000
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes.
Volunteers needed for: Academic tutoring and squash and fitness instruction. Volunteers can stop by as frequently as once a week or as little as a couple times each month.
Why this charity deserves our support: Squash is the most intensively cardiovascular sport you can play with a ball. “It’s a very demanding and intense,” says Squash Smarts Executive Director Stephen Gregg. “You learn a lot about yourself while in that little white box.” Squash Smarts has partnered exclusively with three schools from the city’s impoverished Mantua and Hunting Park areas to take 16 to 20 students a year from sixth grade on for a seven-year commitment. “We don’t choose students based on their fitness or academic ability. If they show the initiative and the effort, we accept them. It’s about commitment,” says Gregg. The program started with eight students in a tiny room on the campus of Drexel University seven years ago. All the students who signed on with Squash Smarts graduated this year, and all have been accepted into institutions of higher learning. “To have a 100 percent retention of that first graduating class, be it a small one, is very important to us,” says Gregg. “And it means the 56 kids we have below them are going, ‘It actually does work.’”

We Are S.E.E.D.S.: Sisters Empowering Excellence, Determination and Success

Philadelphia location: Housed for now at Sherman Mills Arts Development, 3502 Scotts Lane (off Ridge Ave. in East Falls). A permanent headquarters is being sought.
Year established: 2003
Website: wearseeds.org
Name of chief Philadelphia-based executive/years in position: Terri J. Brown/founding executive director
Stated purpose: To provide mentorship and resource services to at-risk inner-city girls 11 to 18.
Annual operating budget: $86,993
Are donations tax deductible?: Yes.
Volunteers needed for: Educational, leadership and social enrichment programs as well as teen pregnancy prevention program. Also seeking after-school tutors and volunteers with a background in social work or urban studies.
Why this charity deserves our support: A former at-risk teen herself, Terri Brown chose to give back to the community by offering adolescent and teen girls in the city the resources to make smarter and healthier life choices. We Are S.E.E.D.S. is North Philly-based, but girls from any part of the city are eligible. Mentors work with the girls on all aspects of their lives, from schoolwork to healthcare to self-esteem.