A Safe Haven

Neli Vazquez Rowland is being honored as a Champion of Change for her efforts in being a Rotarian.

As co-founder and president of A Safe Haven Foundation, I am honored to be named a White House Champion of Change. A Safe Haven Foundation is a non-profit social service agency and related for-profit social business enterprises dedicated to creating jobs and serving as employers to people with employment barriers. Since 1994, all of us at A Safe Haven Foundation have worked with a network of public and private partners to achieve a common mission: solving the issue of homelessness for people in need, one person at a time.

Since then, the vast majority of more than 44,000 people who were homeless have achieved self-sufficiency through the A Safe Haven holistic model. Consistent with the theme throughout our history to Aspire, Transform and Sustain, the individuals residing at A Safe Haven aspire for a stable lifestyle, transform through adult education courses and job skills training programs, and gain the confidence and skills to sustain employment and housing that allows them to support themselves and their families.

Over the last 19 years, at A Safe Haven we are proud to have designed a unique, vertically integrated "eco-system" that assists homeless individuals and families to pursue and achieve their God-given potential. The process is simple and rooted in empirical evidence. We assess and help people in need to address, alleviate and resolve the problems that led to financial crisis and homelessness, whether it is chronic or for the first time. Programming is assessment-driven and may include treatment, education, job training and placement, life skills training, financial literacy, and a myriad of other services structured to help each individual become self-sufficient. These changes also improve the lives of the families and break the cycle of generational poverty.

As we all know, the high cost of homelessness and poverty on our communities is manifested by high unemployment/underemployment, increase in crime, demand for drugs and illegal weapons, rampant violence, skyrocketing school truancy and dropout rates. We believe that nothing can replace the importance of empowering people with social and economic stability, which will help them break the cycle of poverty and provide them with the skills necessary to sustain long-term self-sufficiency. We cannot think of a better investment that offers a better return than investing in our most precious resource: people.

During this pivotal time in our nation's history when we are facing the many issues that result from homelessness and poverty, we are proud to be considered a national model and to have been noticed by leadership from other major cities across the country. For the first time at A Safe Haven, we are considering our options to expand the A Safe Haven footprint beyond Illinois.

We are blessed with outstanding support of proactive board members, partners, sponsors, donors, volunteers, professional staff, the business community and the community, at large. It is a privilege to be part of this life-giving organization.

Neli Vazquez Rowland is the co-founder and President of Safe Haven.

Not In My Backyard

Peggy Halderman is being honored as a Champion of Change for her efforts in being a Rotarian.

I came to learn about hunger by working with food. After I retired from the Park Service as an Assistant Regional Director for External Affairs in the Intermountain Region, I went back to school to learn to be a professional chef. After training with master chefs in both Italy and France, I completed my culinary studies at Cook Street in Denver and set up her personal chef business.

My next step was to sign up to volunteer with a local branch of the nonprofit “Cooking Matters.” It was there that I met a former chef from a local restaurant, Andy Nowak. It was through Andy that I began to learn about hidden childhood hunger and the need for weekend “kid food.” He explained that he and his wife put together backpacks with enough food for one kid for a weekend. The thought of kids without food jarred me, and that’s when I began to explore in more depth the hidden epidemic of childhood hunger.

This weighed on my heart, and I asked Andy where I could learn more about it. That’s how I met Kathy Underhill, who managed a local food bank. She invited me to shadow her over time, and I learned quickly the importance of partnerships, especially with the faith community and school personnel. Very quickly, she taught me the basic formulae associated with how to determine the level of need within a school or community. Then, as an educational exercise, I gathered the data about the upper-middle class city of Golden, Colorado, only to learn that we had almost 450 children who had no food on the weekend.

Shocked and outraged, I said, “Not in my backyard. Not in America!” I took my findings to the board of my Rotary Club of Golden. Everyone on the board was shocked by the numbers, and gave me the challenge of “fixing” it. I explained that I didn’t know how much it would cost, and the Board said that they would write the check; my job was to “fix it.” As I began to think about how to approach it, I shared the numbers with people throughout the City. No one knew about these numbers or what it meant. Within several weeks I decided to try a pilot project with a school where the Rotary Club had strong relationships, Bell Middle School. But it was at the end of the school year, so we decided to do some planning over the summer. And then fate intervened. Because of an accident, I ended up with a bad compound fracture and was confined to a wheel chair for four months, critical months during which I had to complete the project planning. Because I had to approach the project differently while in a wheelchair, I finalized the operation plan of working through our nonprofit arm, the Golden Rotary Foundation, to develop a relationship with the Food Bank of the Rockies. My next step was to find a warehouse to store the provisions. With one phone call to the Developmental Disabilities Resource Center, I found a partner organization that would pick up my ordered food, fill the sacks of food, and deliver the sacks to the schools. Through this arrangement, we were able to expand easily as the program grew.

So, as we served 65 kids in our pilot, the community heard about what we were trying to do and wanted information and wanted to help. As the program grew to meet the needs all of the schools in Golden, a call came from the Golden Police Department. They explained that they had so many calls from a Jefferson County “Options School” that they finally figured out all the problems were associated with hunger. They asked if we could help. Of course, with our community, we met the needs quickly. Once we provided food, attendance went up, disciplinary problems diminished, and we once again witnessed the amazing difference that full tummies can make.

Two more individuals learned about our program. One was a businessman who remembered his hungry childhood when he had white bread, Crisco, and sugar for dinner. He decided to not only help cover the food costs but also to make sure that these children, who were without food, would each have a Christmas stocking. This program continues to this day. Yet one more person stepped forward with a blank check, asking how she could help. With a “blank check,” I decided to test whether feeding kids makes a difference in how a child learns. Working with principals at two local elementary schools, I asked: Once we feed the kids AND we give each a book of his/her own, does it make a difference? The answer after five months of the program was a resounding: YES! From a regular elementary school, the principal cited many anecdotes of positive activity. From the Title I elementary school, the data were even more telling: With five months' worth of books, the children of the title I school increase their reading ability on average of two levels! Granted, generally the children were not reading at grade level, but they are making strides in the right direction!

So, we are in our fifth year, and I asked the Golden community a question: What should we do in our next five years? The community was very clear: We love what the Golden Backpack Program does for the kids during the school year. Now, do it year-round. And within 24 short hours, I received a donation of a half-size “beer bus” that we could convert into a mobile food pantry. Then it was back to a wonderful community team to figure out how to feed kids weekday lunches. Chiefly among them were Deacon Bethany Thomas, Dan Thoemke, Judy Maxwell, Reagan Giffels, and the Food Bank of the Rockies. We laid out the summer program quickly, including this “beer bus” that we needed to figure out how to convert into a mobile food pantry.

Then, as fate would have it, the Golden Backpack Program became one of 177 projects accepted by the Walmart Foundation for participation in the 2013 Walmart Foundation “Fighting Hunger Together” campaign. If our program garners enough votes, we will win $20k in time to complete the conversation of “the beer bus” into our Snack-n-Wagon (yes, our mobile food pantry) and we begin feeding kids this July 1, 2013!

So, where does all this end? When there are no hungry children in our community. It is so important that our kids have the right food, for without food these children – our future – will not have a chance to be all that each one of them can be. It’s as simple as that. And, believe it or not, it is doable!

Peggy Halderman is the creator of the Golden Backpack Program (GBP).

Hello, Sandy!

Bonnie Sirower is being honored as a Champion of Change for her efforts in being a Rotarian.

Like the lead character in Hello, Dolly!, I’ve always been a woman who arranges things. So when Hurricane Sandy hit the New York and New Jersey area at the end of October, I knew that I had to do something to organize all of us to provide relief for all those who had lost their homes and their belongings and to start the rebuilding efforts. Our Rotary Districts in New Jersey and New York have a long history of working together on projects such as a Vocational Assembly that honors those who use their occupations to help Rotary and group public relations projects, so we already had the mechanism in place to work together.

The hurricane ruined more than 300,000 homes and businesses within a 300 mile radius from our location in northern New Jersey. More than three million people were, like me, without power, Internet, computers, phone or cable for weeks. The day after, trees were down everywhere and roads were blocked. In my own Rotary District, two towns were completely flooded when the Hackensack river overflowed a berm that had protected Moonachie and Little Ferry for years. Hoboken was underwater, as was Jersey City. Many of the Rotarians in our district had to be rescued from chest-deep water or had their homes and businesses destroyed.

But even before the storm, I started to receive messages from around the world expressing their concern for us from as far away as my friend, the District Governor in Vladivostok, Russia, saying that they were praying for us. We used our website, www.nynjrotary.org, as disaster central to let everyone know what was happening. Over the next four weeks, we had nearly 4,000 hits.

On Thursday after the storm, when we could finally drive a little, I visited the neighboring town and my phone blinked on with over 250 messages and 600 emails from people all over the country and the world asking what they could do to help. We quickly learned that we had to communicate, collect, and then collaborate together on rebuilding. I started reaching out by phone and e-mail and Facebook to my fellow Rotary Governors, those who had contacted us, and the Rotary Clubs in our area hardest hit by the Hurricane. We have a great Rotary District here in northern New Jersey, and four Rotarians had already donated their warehouses. On Saturday, I addressed the 1,500 participants at Rotary Day at the United Nations to let them know how they could help.

By Monday night the next week, the first truck rolled in – from Maryland – laden with food supplies, diapers, bottled water, blankets, cots, and linens. In the next six weeks, more than 130 trucks from as far away as Orlando, Vancouver, Maine, and San Diego dropped off supplies at our warehouses. More than 225 volunteers from Rotary and the Volunteer Center of Bergen County worked every day and weekend for six weeks to sort what had been donated and to deliver the goods all the way down to the southernmost parts of the New Jersey shore and the eastern part of Long Island.

We worked in concert with Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters run by the Volunteer Center of Bergen County to plan all of the relief. Peter Wells, an architect from the Park Ridge Rotary Club, and our District’s Disaster Chair, did a yeoman’s job of coordinating all of the deliveries to the warehouses, sorting everything, and directing deliveries. Peter’s efforts kept our warehouses open for six weeks with weekend deliveries each week to more than 400 destinations until the Rotary Districts down the Jersey Shore and out in Far Rockaway, Queens, could open their own warehouses and accept donations. We received more than $18 million in donated goods, including 84,000 pounds of used clothing that we couldn’t even distribute.

People from all over the world were very generous, too. We received more than $600,000 in cash donations plus tens of thousands of dollars in gift cards that were distributed throughout the six Rotary districts most affected. We received donations from Canada, Turkey, Australia, Israel, and from virtually every state. CBS Radio donated $5,000 worth of ads broadcasting “Help Rotary Help Hurricane Sandy victims” and urging folks to visit our website. These donations were split among the six most affected districts, but monies donated within each district stayed there.

Our work is not done. The rebuilding effort will take two to three years. We are still working together with organizations like VOAD, Habitat for Humanity, and Rebuilding Together. So far, in our District, we have helped repair and refurbish two firehouses, donated equipment to the ambulance corps in two cities, and helped pay for renovations to the recreational fields in Secaucus. We will be painting another firehouse next week and just paid for the development of a volunteer reception center and a hostel in Moonachie where volunteers from all over the country can stay. Other districts are helping individuals rebuild home, working on homes of families with disabled children, and building day care centers and gardens. Many people are still homeless, even five months later, and still have no power or heat. Residents in southern NJ and Long Island/Brooklyn/Queens still need supplies.

Thank you again for this great honor and the opportunity to share. Hurricane Sandy brought together all of the Rotarians in our District, in the other Districts nearby and throughout the world to share in easing the pain of those who had lost their homes and businesses.