When the idea of frat brothers comes to mind, most of us probably conjure up images of crazy college parties. However, one fraternity is defying the stereotype and extending the notion of brotherhood to an unlikely group: the homeless.
Huntsville, Ala. has a substantial homeless population and a large portion of it is comprised of veterans. Fortunately, the Phi Kappa Phi fraternity at the University of Alabama – Huntsville has a solution in mind. In operation for less than a year, the members of frat have been working toward creating a tiny homes village for those without shelter in their community.
The idea began to develop after members of the group encountered a homeless man at a local Sonic restaurant. Moved by the experience, the frat brothers started having regular meals with various members of the homeless community, which inspired them to become more involved.
“Me and my brothers were like, ‘we want to do something about this,’” Phi Kappa Phi president Taylor Reed tells WHNT News.
With the help of Foundation for Tomorrow and the Help Our Veterans and Civilians organization, Phi Kappa Phi began plans for a tiny homes village, which will consist of multiple residences that are less than 500 square feet, are mobile and are fully equipped. To create an inclusive feeling, the village will also include a community garden that will be maintained by the residents as well as a space where a group meal will be consumed at least once a week.
Each unit costs about $5,000 to build, and about 30 homes can fit on one acre of land, which is the amount that the Foundation for Tomorrow is hoping to receive from the city of Huntsville. Alabama Center for Sustainable Energy has already volunteered to supply solar panels for the homes. Further, the frat brothers plan to build all of the homes themselves with the assistance of their fellow community members.
In order to raise the funds, Phi Kappa Phi is currently operating a website fundraiser. Their goal? To raise $10,000 and, as of November 19, they have raised $6,493.
For Help Our Homeless Veterans and Civilians CEO Rusty Loiselle, these homes are a rare and needed opportunity.
“Get them out of cardboard boxes and into these tiny homes while they go through re-training and get the assistance they need,” Loiselle tells WHNT News. “These tiny homes are a step towards nice solid housing, it’s a step up.”
MORE: Portland is About to Get Tons of Tiny Homes That Can Shelter the Homeless
Tag: nonprofits
To Combat Child Food Insecurity, These Brothers Biked Cross Country
What does two brothers plus one penny per mile times 4,000 miles equal?
The answer: 400 meals for children living in poverty in the U.S.
Hailing from Ferndale, Michigan, Jon and Chris Gagnon are well acquainted with the childhood food insecurity problem in Detroit. In Wayne County, Mich., the rate of child food insecurity is 22.3 percent, meaning 102,790 children don’t have sufficient access to nutritious food.
While volunteering with an AmeriCorps summer program, Jon heard about No Kid Hungry – a national nonprofit that helps bring federal and state assistance programs to families and children. Jon is now employed by Groundwerx.CI, a Detroit nonprofit that works with No Kid Hungry.
Due to this experience, the Gagnon brothers saw that something needed to be done, and their solution was a cross-country bike campaign to raise money for the organization.
Their ride started on Sept. 3 in San Francisco and concluded Oct. 17 in Washington D.C. For six weeks, the brothers toured all around the country seeing sights all too common in Detroit: tons of grocery stores and farmers markets, but people still living without healthy food. During their trip, they were able to witness and experience the daily struggle of those families.
“Being hungry doesn’t just make your stomach growl,” Chris wrote on the brothers’ blog. “It drains your energy, steals your focus and makes the simplest actions feel impossible.”
Before they started their trip, the brothers began an online fundraising campaign on the No Kid Hungry website. Donors could make a straight donation or an amount per mile. Just $1 can provide 10 meals for a child.
Of the collected donations, 20 percent will go to the national No Kid Hungry and the other 80 percent is heading to the Detroit chapter. The brothers’ goal was to raise $25,000. As of November 13, $18, 117 was raised, and donations are still being accepted online.
While fighting child food insecurity is a long journey not near completion, the Gagnon brothers have shown what can be accomplished with a few dollars, bikes and some perseverance.
MORE: The District Where Healthy School Lunches Are Actually Succeeding
The Reason Why Businesses Should Hire Employees With Disabilities
Finding a job is difficult for the average person. Add a disability into the mix, and the odds seem impossible, especially since there’s the stereotype that hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) will be a detriment to business.
All that could change, however, thanks to a recent study showing that employees with IDD aren’t just charity cases and that they contribute positively to both the work environment and the bottom line.
The study was conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), an organization which examines high performance organizations. According to the report, hiring people with IDD “adds highly motivated people to the workforce (which can lead to increased productivity) and it promotes an inclusive culture that appeals to the talent pool organizations want to attract.” All of this translates into a better community image and an increase in profits.
Of the employers surveyed, three-quarters gave their employees with IDD ratings of “good” or “very good” in the areas of work quality, motivation, engagement, integration with co-workers, dependability and attendance. Adding to that, 80 percent reported positive experiences and one-third reported having their expectations exceeded.
The Institute’s study confirms what organizations that work with individuals with IDD have been saying for years, like Best Buddies International, a nonprofit that has been working to find equal employment and opportunity for those with disabilities since its inception in 1989.
In response to the study’s release, Best Buddies started a media campaign entitled “I’m In To Hire” highlighting the positives that come along with hiring those with disabilities. As of October 24, the website had 100,000 pledges of support.
Anthony K. Shriver is the Founder and Chairman of Best Buddies and remarks how individuals with IDDs can transform the workplace.
“They’ve hired an effective and enthusiastic employee, and now have lower turnover in those jobs,” Shriver tells The Daily Beast. “The culture of our schools have changed since we began inclusion of people with IDD. Our offices can transform as well.
Pathways to Careers is another organization working with individuals with IDD. Rather than focusing on the disabilities, Pathways markets the individual and matches the skillset with the job.
Considering 85 percent of people with IDD don’t have paid work, both the report and programs such as these has the potential to inspire change.
Bottom line: These workers have much more going for them than the disability that constrains them.
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When It Comes to Helping Homeless Vets, Could Thinking Small Be The Answer?
You’d think Joseph Gotesman would have his hands full with studying. After all, he’s a 22-year-old second-year medical student at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
But Gotesman finds the time to lead the small organization VetConnect that seeks out homeless veterans in the Bronx and keeps in touch with them until they find stable housing.
Since January, Gotesman and a handful of volunteers have been walking the streets, looking for homeless people holding cardboard signs saying they’re vets or just asking the people if they’ve served. When they find a homeless soldier, VetConnect works to verify his or her status and begins the process of applying for benefits and finding assistance programs.
So far, VetConnect has helped five veterans attain stable housing and assisted several others find employment.
Jacow W. Sotak of the New York Times asked Chris Miller of the New York City Department of Homeless Services whether such a small-scale effort helps given the magnitude of the city’s homelessness problem. It does, says Miller. “Many of our partners started out as small, neighborhood-focused organizations. We value every effort, however small, to reach out to a homeless man or woman and connect them to services. It makes a difference.”
Gotesman tells Sotak that he believes the strength of VetConnect is its focused, local nature. “You can’t get more local than community members reaching out to their own. And as we grow, it will be community members reaching out to their own as well. You won’t see me at a VetConnect excursion in an L.A. or a Boston community excursion.”
Still, Gotesman recognizes the VetConnect model could work well elsewhere, so he’s helping people in other states organize their own teams. “Helping a veteran is not a quick, simple feat,” he tells Sotak in an email. “It takes time and relationship and trust building.”
Having a local team of dedicated volunteers who can win the trust of homeless vets and keep checking on them until their situation improves is essential. And clearly, so is having some high-achieving millennials willing to pitch in.
MORE: This Veteran Literally Searches Through Shrubbery for Homeless Soldiers Needing Assistance
For Soldiers Enduring Seemingly Endless Recoveries, This Organization Provides Free Beach Vacations
With a giant crowd lining the street, fire companies saluting and bagpipes blaring, you’d think it was July 4th or Memorial Day. But the cause for celebration on this balmy July Sunday wasn’t a national holiday. It was to honor the wounded U.S. soldiers and their families who were being treated to an all-expenses-paid vacation to Long Beach, N.Y., courtesy of the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors (LBWW).
Amid all the bad publicity surrounding scheduling discrepancies at VA hospitals nationwide and the plight of our returning troops in general, there’s another issue that’s seldom mentioned: the hardships borne by injured service members who require long-term hospital care.
Soldiers with debilitating injuries — both mental and physical—may never receive the warm hometown welcome depicted in car commercials. Instead, they go to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to receive treatment and rehabilitation until their doctors classify them as non-medical assist (meaning they no longer need to be at the hospital or require doctors and nurses to be nearby day to day). Depending upon the extent of their injuries, some soldiers are stuck at the hospital for indefinite periods of time.
So in 2009, John McLoughlin, a retired New York City fireman, decided to do something special for those service members by founding the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors. He modeled LBWW on The Graybeards, a civic organization in the Rockaways, N.Y., that runs an adaptive sports festival for the disabled. McLoughlin took this idea a step further, extending it to a weeklong summer vacation and paying for the entire trip and accommodations, as well as providing specialized activities.
This past summer, LBWW flew in 22 injured vets and 46 of their family members to the seashore community.
A few days after the parade, Luke, a Marine from the Midwest who had both legs amputated above the knees after sustaining catastrophic blast wounds in Afghanistan, sits on the beach with his parents and kid sister and talks about the more than 50 surgeries he’s endured in the past two and a half years.
“I was hoping to have my prosthetics for this [week], but…” Luke says with a shrug, referring to the never-ending succession of infections that snag his rehab and timeline for leaving the hospital. Through the Wounded Warrior Project, Luke is one of eight vets in a cyber security training program that upon completion should land him a job with NASA.
Luke’s wife and two kids are also with him in Long Beach (staying at the Allegria Hotel, which has partnered with LBWW for years), where he’s actually able to spend a rare week living with them. That’s because, while his family is able to live in on-base housing, he and the other inpatients on medical-hold stay in barracks on Walter Reed’s campus.
He doesn’t dwell on the subject and instead smiles, recalling the fishing charter he went on that morning. “It was rough out there,” he says. “We were like five miles out, and I got a little nervous for a minute in my wheelchair.” Luke caught the boat’s only keeper of the day, a 24-incher.
Luke and another double-amputee, Jose, are able to participate in perhaps LBWW’s most unlikely activity: surfing lessons. A team of instructors shows up in the early afternoon with boards specially designed to accommodate surfers with disabilities. Both are catching waves in no time.
Jose was enjoying the LBWW vacation with his wife and brother. He also lives at Walter Reed, and his family is burdened by the same circumstances as Luke’s. Fortunately, however, Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds specially designed housing for disabled vets, recently broke ground on a new house for Jose and his wife on Long Island, not far from his family in Queens.
Historically, LBWW tries to help the most severely injured and those that have recently returned from deployment overseas. In fact, sometimes the families are being reunited for the first time. But as the role of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan has wound down, the organization has also reached out to vets who’ve been in the hospital for an extended period of time — years or even decades.
Also lounging on the beach that day are 42 Vietnam veterans from the local Northport VA Medical Center. Most are afflicted with some combination of mental and physical illnesses. Ned, a potbellied volunteer with long gray hair and beard, nods to Ralph, a barrel-chested vet with no toes, and explains how much this day means to Ralph. “When he got up this morning, there was a big ‘0’ on the wall in his room. Tomorrow it’ll say ‘365.’ He counts down the days until we come out again next year.”
Just then, four teenage volunteer boys and Jerry, a retired fireman and boisterous volunteer with LBWW since its inception, lift Ralph into a specially designed beach wheelchair and roll him on the sand and into the surf, 10 hands securely on the handles as he bobs and smiles through the waves during his second dip of the afternoon.
The severity of Northport Vets’ disabilities made day trips a huge challenge for the VA’s staff. But with the enthusiasm and organization that LBWW has built over the years, it’s now safe and practical for the group to bring the Vietnam vets out as well. LBWW keeps a team of volunteer nurses from Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital on hand at all times during the week’s activities, led by Nurse Patty, a mainstay with the group.
Jerry explains that LBWW’s success is reliant on its relatively small size, and that repeating their model is best done at the local level. He says that large programs like the “Wounded Warriors Project have great resources” that can help LBWW get off the ground, “but they also have a huge infrastructure, which creates a lot of overhead.” With LBWW’s web of tight, local functionaries, every dollar raised goes directly to their cause. Aside from the considerable cost of plane tickets and accommodations, LBWW has also raised funds for a private tour of Ground Zero and Rockefeller Center, the weekend parade and BBQ, a 5K race, a Mets game and the fishing trip, not to mention three beach days packed with food, drinks, surfing and even a massage tent.
LBWW’s success has already inspired another group, the West Palm Beach Waterfront Warriors, who’ve been bringing wounded vets and their families to the Florida coast since 2011.
Which shorefront community will be next?
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The names and identifying information of the veterans in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.
The Bay City’s Latest Plan to Combat Homelessness
San Francisco is a city of paradoxes. Walking around, you can see evidence of the booming tech scene and expensively-clad citizens, yet it also has a chronic homelessness problem. But the City by the Bay finally thinks it may have a solution by combining the needs of both the homeless and corporations: tax breaks for community projects.
With 6,436 homeless people and 3,401 living on its streets, according to the Human Services Agency, San Francisco has to be inventive. And that’s where this new initiative comes in. As more and more tech companies, (like Twitter) move to the area, San Francisco is hoping that its new “community benefit agreement” will encourage these businesses to stay and improve the city.
Through the initiative, tech companies will receive multi-million dollar tax breaks if they set up residence in a troubled neighborhood and invest a portion of those tax breaks into improving it.
While some remain skeptical about the amount of money that a company will actually put towards a neighborhood, this program offers unique possibilities for great change. For instance, many tech companies will set up micro-apartment communities for their employees; if created for homeless people, there’s the potential to drastically reduce the problem.
Salt Lake City is a model for this type of project. Ten years ago, the Utah city started a program to combat homelessness through these micro-apartments communities. Apartments were set up outside of troubled neighborhoods, and residents were quickly placed into them, removing them from the negative influences.
In each housing complex, on-site counseling was available. These counselors helped residents beat drug addictions, find jobs and diagnose and treat mental diseases. The result? Salt Lake City now only has about 400 homeless persons.
Although there are differences in cost of living and other factors between Salt Lake City and San Francisco, there is possibility for replication and improvement.
For Matt Minkevitch, who runs Road Home, the main nonprofit homeless agency in Utah, these houses serve as a stepping stone.
“The idea is, we don’t want people to just live in this shelter,” Minkevitch tells San Francisco Gate. “We want to make it as comfortable as possible, but we want them to move on to housing — on to better lives.”
DON’T MISS: Ever Wondered What To Say To A Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say And 5 Things Not to Say
When the Poor and Elderly Can’t Afford to Feed Their Pets, This Nonprofit Comes to the Rescue
As an owner of dogs, finches, cockatiels, guinea pigs, mice, tropical fish, a duck, a rabbit and more through the years, it’s obvious that Marianne Iaquinto of Wyndmoor, Penn. has always been a pet lover.
When her beloved Shih Tzu, Sam, was dying in 2012, Iaquinto decided to let her grief fuel a vital service: Helping the poor and elderly keep their pets instead of turning them over to shelters when they can’t afford them. So she started the nonprofit Sam’s Hope.
To date, Sam’s Hope has collected and distributed more than 44,000 pounds of pet food to the needy.
In particular, Iaquinto is moved by the plight of impoverished elderly people who aren’t able to pay for their pet’s upkeep and are forced to put them in a shelter.
“The elderly, sometimes all they have in life is their pet, their only reason to get up in the morning,” Iaquinto tells Len Lear of Chestnut Hill Local. “In this case, they don’t surrender their pets; they sacrifice their own health and well-being, sharing their food and forgoing medication to provide for the pet.”
The Doris Day Animal Foundation has recognized Sam’s Hope for its work, providing funding to the organization to start a new service: Meals for the Pets of the Homebound and Elderly. Just as their owners are given monthly meal deliveries, the pets receive food, too.
Besides distributing about 4,000 pounds of pet food and cat litter each month to both pet food pantries and directly to pet owners, Sam’s Hope assists in a variety of ways — including veterinary care for pets whose owners can’t afford it. Volunteers for the nonprofit once also captured and relocated a bunch of feral cats after their owner died and helped a sick pet owner find homes for eight of his cats.
Iaquinto plans to start two voucher programs: One giving the poor the ability to have their pets spayed and neutered, and the other, which will enable people to adopt older shelter pets who often are left behind in favor of puppies and kittens.
In 2013, Iaquinto left her job as the vice-president of McGruff Safe Kids’ Total ID System and now volunteers 50 to 60 hours a week with Sam’s Hope. “How do I do it? Well, I have found that there are things in life that are more important than money. I am happier than I have ever been before. Money doesn’t buy that,” she says.
Guaranteed the pet owners and their furry friends that have received assistance from Sam’s Hope are happier than ever, too.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Sam’s Hope operated out of a local restaurant. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
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One Year Later: How America’s First Non-Profit Supermarket Is Faring
About a year ago in Chester, Penn., a group of individuals started a supermarket. However, this wasn’t just any grocery store: Fare & Square is the first non-profit one in the country.
Twelve years ago, the last supermarket in Chester (a city about 15 miles from Philadelphia, where 31 percent of its residents live below the poverty line and the median income is $27,546) closed its doors, leaving residents with few food options. As a result, more and more residents relied on Philabundance, a Philadelphia-based food bank, but fewer and fewer donations were coming in. So Philabundance president and executive director Bill Clark realized that something needed to be done.
“We knew that Chester was a market in need,” Clark tells Next City. “When everybody can’t get food at a grocery store and goes to emergency food cupboards, that’s not a very good, effective way to deal with the problem, either.”
His solution? Fare & Square — a supermarket that will provide a wide variety of healthy options, as well as host special events where Chester residents can receive health screenings.
With a year under its belt, Fare & Square is now assessing its progress. So far, it’s been slow-coming as the owners try to adjust their products to fit their clients’ needs, which must strike a balance between healthy options and ones that are affordable.
Fare & Square’s managing director Paul Messina remains optimistic and views the situation as trial–and–error.
“It’s Fare & Square 1,” Messina says to Next City. “We’re still trying to do our best to keep our cost of goods down for the community, and we are making changes. We’re looking very, very closely at the product mix that we currently have in the store and seeing what we can continue to sell at what prices. We do feel that we’re going to need to eliminate some items that cost more money than we’re able to sell at a good cost for the community.”
For a community without much, Fare & Square is demonstrating that all sorts of possibilities are possible, thanks to food.
MORE: When Its Only Grocery Store Closed Its Doors, This Town Didn’t Have to Look Far for New Owners
With Odds Stacked Against Them, This Group Is Helping to Build Self-Esteem in Young Black Women
“Babies raising babies,” is how Tracey Wilson Mourning, a former journalist and wife of retired Miami Heat basketball player Alonzo Mourning, describes the group of teenage girls carrying their children near her neighborhood in Florida to The Root.
“I wondered, ‘Which one am I?’ out of that group, had it not been for the mommy I had, had it not been for the amazing women in my life,” she says.
This questioning led Mourning to start a mentoring group for young black women called Honey Shine.
Since 2002, the organization has been reaching out to young black women in Florida, offering group mentorship, a six-week summer day camp and bi-monthly workshops focused on education, health, nutrition, sex and drug education, and making goals for the future. The participants are called “Honey Bugs,” and sharing warmth and affection among the generations is a big part of Honey Shine’s mission.
Honey Shine turns even fun events into learning experiences. For example, a back-to-school shopping trip sponsored by Forever21 that helped 100 girls pick out clothes for school was also an opportunity to teach the Honey Bugs about budgeting and “shopping smart.”
Mourning tells The Root that these girls benefit from guidance in all aspects of their lives. “I know a lot of these young girls don’t have that mom that I had, don’t have those people pulling them up by their coattails or taking them outside of their neighborhoods,” she says. “We have girls that come from neighborhoods called ‘the Graveyard’ where two out of 12 are graduating from high school. Not on our watch.”
Most of all, Mourning wants Honey Shine to show the girls the possibilities that await them if they stay out of trouble and get an education: “[Women] run companies. We own companies. We influence the world,” Mourning says. “And if our girls see that, what a difference that makes. Self-esteem is a powerful tool. We all make dumb mistakes when our self-esteem is low, and I don’t know anyone immune from that, but I feel like if we build self-esteem in our young girls…it makes the world of difference.”
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What Happens When You Give a Soldier a Pen Instead of a Gun?
For seven years, members of a Philadelphia-based nonprofit have been traveling the country turning the stereotype of veterans not speaking about their military service on its head.
Warrior Writers hosts regular workshops for veterans in Chicago; Ithaca, N.Y.; New York City and Boston; as well as visiting workshops in other cities to help soldiers (regardless of age) express their feelings and experiences through poetry and prose.
This year Warrior Writers is teaming up with Combat Paper, a nonprofit teaching vets how to turn their old uniforms into artful paper (read our story about the organization here), to offer three writing and paper-making workshops in New Jersey. These efforts were made possible by a $135,000 grant from Impact 100 Garden State.
After the veterans and active-duty service personnel polish their writing at the workshop in Morristown, N.J., they will be presenting their work during the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at the NJ Performing Arts Center in Newark on October 25.
One participant in the Morristown workshop is Sarah Mess of Branchburg, N.J. Mess served in the Army in Somalia and wrote a piece in the voice of male soldiers who didn’t think she belonged. “She thinks too highly of herself,” Mess reads in a video for Daily Record. “Let’s knock this girl back down to her stupid, dumb girl position. Come on, boys, sic her. Get her. Beat her. Kick her. Don’t let her up. But she’s bleeding. Good for her. That’s what she gets. She should have never joined the Army.”
“I’m able to express and tap into things here that maybe I didn’t even know were still stirring, like I did today,” Mess tells Lorraine Ash of Daily Record. “I’m able to bring those things to the surface and share them in safe spaces with people who’ve experienced similar things. The draw is that it’s veterans working with veterans. The draw is that we don’t call it therapy. When you start calling things therapy, it creates an aversion to wanting to participate because of the stigma. This works because it’s just community.”
Eli Wright, who works for Combat Paper NJ and served as a medic in the Army, tells Ash that while explorations of painful topics like Mess’s piece are welcome, “We’re not all here because we are broken by the military and trying to heal. We have a lot of veterans involved in these projects who are not combat veterans. A lot served during peacetime, but they’re still artists and they still have plenty of things to say. It’s not all about war trauma.”
Clearly, it’s about art.
MORE: This Paper Can Heal Veterans