Andrea Good

With nine moves in just the last 15 years – to places as vastly different as Japan and Alabama – Kristen Bloom knows something about dislocation.

“I grew up in a small New England town. We would go to the market and see people we knew. There were people to lean on, neighbors and friends who are a strong network of help and support and compassion.

“I realized the importance of that especially over the past decade and a half, with all the moving around to places where I didn’t know anyone,” says Kristen, whose husband serves in the Air Force and is often reassigned. “Dislocation is my middle name.”

When she and her family landed in South Florida in 2017, and she came to know people within the Syrian refugee community there – and their struggles adjusting to new lives and meeting new challenges – it was natural her connection and sensitivity would move her to do something.

That same year she founded Refugee Assistance Alliance (RAA) to help refugees from Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries settling in south Florida – specifically in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties. RAA is a new grantee of The Good People Fund.

“I felt compelled,” Kristen says. “I know what it’s like to start over, but I don’t know the trauma. They have been through so much more than any of us can even imagine. They were in need of a support network that just didn’t exist here.”

In just the three years that it’s been operating, RAA and its corps of about 100 volunteers has helped close to 175 individuals – adults and children – as they strive to gain footing in a new landscape of language, bureaucracy, and custom.

While RAA places a high priority on teaching English to new refugees, it has established what Kristen calls a “holistic” approach to resettlement, recognizing that it is not just basic skills that lead to success, but also relationships, friendships and community.

That’s a challenge in the sprawling two-county region, she says. Compared to the large and thriving Spanish-speaking refugee communities there, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian refugees make up a relatively small percentage of the population and are often geographically isolated from one another – a fact that makes their needs even greater than just language skills.

“The refugees may only know three other families and they are all in the same boat, not established,” Kristen says. “It’s like the blind leading the blind.”

Knowing that, RAA also designs cultural events to build strong ties within the refugee community and to create exposures and learning opportunities for those beyond it; programs for refugee children to guard against isolation and to build long-lasting friendships; tutoring to assist children and adults in school and other learning environments to ensure advancement; and initiatives to help individuals and families navigate everything from citizenship and driving tests, to the healthcare system and emergency preparedness.

The need for building both practical skills and community is great, Kristen says, noting that while new refugees are typically under the wing of resettlement agencies, help usually ends after a relatively short three to six months. RAA gets referrals from these, the Florida Center for Survivors of Torture, Church World Service, and word of mouth.

As the coronavirus pandemic has hit communities hard since last spring, RAA has pivoted away from in-person visits to Zoom-based gatherings. The organization gifted laptops to each of its clients so they can remain connected and continue with virtual tutoring and visits.

In fact, all of the 47 school-age children who depend on RAA for academic tutoring advanced to the next grade level this year, a development that Kristen describes as “a huge victory during extra-challenging times.”

As an impact-maker in her corner of South Florida, Kristen is also involved in refugee issues nationally. She is part of the Hello Neighbor Network, a consortium of nine organizations similar to RAA throughout the country. The network was founded in 2019 and is supported by The Good People Fund.

The work of its member organizations will be more critical in coming years as the number of refugees entering the country is expected to increase, Kristen says.

“We are in uncharted territory. Many of us are less than five years old. There is no blueprint for what we are doing. So it’s critically important that we learn from each other and share best practices so we can best serve those in our communities.”

Ask Kristen to describe that one moment that made her know she was doing the right thing at the right moment and she doesn’t pause.

She tells the story of one refugee from Syria who was having such a hard time adjusting to life in the United States that she was considering going back to her homeland. But with the continuing encouragement, support and community she received from RAA, she stayed and earned her GED and is a role model of success and inspiration to her own children.

And that, Kristen said, is a success of the people-to-people connections that are at the heart of RAA’s mission and her own.

“People are just people, yearning for connections, and you don’t need the same culture or language or religion to get that,” she said. “Our ultimate goal is to build peace and understanding among the people of South Florida. I believe it’s harder to hate up close.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

If you’re looking for Larry Oleinick on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, just spot the blue Chrysler Pacifica that’s parked in Hart Plaza in central Detroit.

It’s there that he and a small contingent of co-workers set up an oasis, of sorts, for dozens of people who are homeless or experiencing severe hardship.

Here, they find outstretched hands holding sandwiches and snacks, a cup of coffee, a needed new hoodie or pair of socks, and any number of other life-sustaining essentials.

But perhaps most importantly, they find a community. Because it’s in Hart Plaza, by the van, that they are known by their names, and they feel counted, and that means everything in a world that often shuns them or renders them invisible.

“The greatest gift we can give to people is letting them know they are not alone,” said Larry. “We do that by showing up.”

Larry founded Heart 2 Hart Detroit – a new grantee organization of The Good People Fund – in 2012, after a career in the dental supply business. Talk to him for any length of time, and it becomes clear how and why he landed in this place.

It was during his teenage and young adult years, after all, that his parents organized an extended-family project each Passover, setting up card tables in their suburban Detroit home and putting everyone on an assembly line to pack boxes full of matzo, candies, and other holiday items.

When that was done, everyone got a mapped-out route to deliver the boxes to those in need, including people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

“I was fortunate enough to have parents who wanted to get involved and help people,” Larry said. “They modeled this for me and it rubbed off. Kindness doesn’t just fall out of the sky, you have to make it happen.”

The turning point came for him one hot summer Tuesday off from work, when he decided in the moment to take a cooler on wheels and some simple snacks to downtown Detroit and see who he could help.

“I realized the comfort I could give by handing a bottle of water and a bag of chips and a minute or two of conversation to people with virtually nothing,” he said.  “Many of them had had one bad break and didn’t make it back and their lives went spiraling down. That could happen to any of us.

“I’d been thinking about it for years. I wanted to get out of the business world and do something to help people all the time. So I took the leap. You don’t need a degree for this. Just a heart.”

Heart 2 Hart Detroit was born and established very shortly after that. With monetary and in-kind donations, it reaches about 100 people every day out in the field, and has grown to the extent that in 2019 alone, it distributed over 14,000 lunches, 140 winter coats, 6,100 hygiene product items, 5,500 pairs of socks, and the list goes on. And, all from that blue Pacifica van parked in Hart Plaza and now other locations in the city as well, like parks, shelters, and largely abandoned streets.

The organization is firmly rooted in the belief that interactions with those it helps are not merely transactional. Indeed, its success and deep impact is fueled by trust formed between those it helps, and Heart 2 Hart Detroit’s staff and corps of volunteers.

“If you give people consistency and honesty and a smile, that goes a long way to build a relationship and grow friendship,” Larry said. “We go way beyond food and clothing, to honoring them with integrity as individuals, and finding out what is going on and how we might be able to somehow help.”

In fact, Heart 2 Heart Detroit has connected those it serves to community service organizations, rehab facilities, estranged family members, and even to potential employees. Larry freely gives his phone number to those he meets on the streets, a literal lifeline for some.

With the coronavirus pandemic affecting interactions and patterns nearly universally, Larry and his team are adjusting, but a level of intimacy has been lost, for now at least.

“There is now by necessity a lot of physical space between us and there are aspects that get lost when you can’t hug someone or talk too closely. There is a confidence and a trust that is lost. We make sure they are getting everything they need, of course, but it is a challenge. Hopefully we can make up for all that is lost soon enough.”

In the meantime, that blue Pacifica, with Larry at the wheel, will be there, as everyone who relies on it expects it to be. “Nothing will stop us,” Larry said.

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

Ten Gav (Hebrew, “covering someone’s back”) uses a crowd-funding model and web platform to match donors with Israeli individuals and families facing hardship. Ten Gav is a Good People Fund grantee and its two founders, Naomi Brounstein and Vivi Mann, describe how technology and human connection can uplift lives and promote the Jewish practice of tzedakah.

College campuses are unpredictable environments for Jewish students, with rising levels of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. TribeTalk – a Good People Fund grantee – prepares and empowers students to navigate through it. We’re with TribeTalk Co-Founders Michelle Black, Robin Friedman, and Jude Sydney … along with Emmet Klein, a college student and TribeTalk Fellow.

“El Paso Strong.”

Those words on digital traffic boards along I-10 in this Texas city bordering Mexico couldn’t mask a pervasive sense of sorrow.

The day before, 22 people of Hispanic origin were murdered, and 24 seriously wounded, while shopping in a Walmart. The shooter, a white nationalist racist, traveled over 500 miles and hunted down Hispanic people like prey in the store aisles.

Just over 24 hours later, thousands of Texans held a solemn vigil at a sports field located near the crime scene. They heard speeches of solidarity from leaders, including rabbis, priests, imams and ministers.

Local politicians spoke against hatred and about El Paso’s reputation as among the nation’s safest of cities.

A Hispanic woman identifying herself as only Theresa shouted, “This is our Kristallnacht, this is our Holocaust,” and said her mother was a Crypto Jew from the Dominican Republic. Theresa said she had taught courses in Holocaust education in El Paso’s public schools.

“This is just so painful,” she said. “It closely resembles what I believe happened to the Jewish people during the 1930s.”

A day later, we met another Hispanic woman who knew all too personally the pain of gun crime.

Lupita, a grandmother of three, entered the US at El Paso from Juarez, Mexico. She arrived with the children after her son was gunned down in a Juarez bar. Her daughter was also killed by gunfire in the same city. A third son, who entered the US in El Paso, is being detained in a federal camp in Louisiana pending his asylum application.

The children were separated from her at the border, taken to New York, where they stayed until finally being returned to a small, run-down, largely Hispanic El Paso suburb.

Rabbi Steven Bayar, JSurge Executive Director, and journalist Phil Jacobs met Lupita as well as many others impacted on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Their trip, in cooperation with The Good People Fund, focuses on bearing witness to the struggle migrants face leaving untenable situations in their home nations with the hope of settling in the States.

Rabbi Bayar and Jacobs went from homeless shelters to meetings with El Paso community activists deeply involved in the migrant conundrum.

At a visit to the Familias Triunfadoras community center, Bayar and Jacobs met the facility’s founder and director, Maria Covernali. She was converting an old adobe style post office into a place for computer education training, a play area for children and a family counseling center.

This is where Lupita showed up one recent day, looking for work and a purpose. For $30 a day, Ms. Covernali hired her to help with clean-up chores. Lupita and her recently arrived grandchildren are living in a nearby church for free.

“I had to leave Mexico,” she told JSurge. “I left everything behind, everything I had, including my house. It just wasn’t safe anymore. My son said that we will be okay here.”

But she added that when the immigration officials separated her from her grandchildren, she was heart broken.

On this day, with contributions from The Good People Fund, those same three children, two boys and a girl, received brand new, complete sets of clothing. The children will attend area schools.

Lupita will continue to work at the community center … and await the status of a humanitarian asylum acceptance to the US, which could take months.

For now, though, she said, “It feels good to smile.”

By Phil Jacobs

She described some health challenges that she believes developed due to years of not-so-great eating habits, like drinking a couple of liters of soda every day and eating lots of fast food.

But she could easily host her own healthy eating show now if she wanted, fluent as she’s become in the terminology and practice of controlling portions, reading and interpreting nutrition and ingredient labels, and getting the best healthy bang for every food dollar she spends.

“I’ve come a long way and this program has been amazing and life changing for not only me, but for my family,” she said. “We are on the right path now.”

This 40-year-old mother of three, who lives in New York City’s East Harlem, is one of about a dozen adults who graduated this past spring from a 12-week program designed to examine their food stories and equip them with the knowledge, motivation and support to alter default behaviors and make better food choices.

The program is an initiative of FEAST (Food, Education, Access, Support, Together), a Los Angeles-based organization that not only advocates for food security for vulnerable populations, but also runs community-based wellness programs, like the one in East Harlem, to empower individuals and families, many of them low-income, to navigate what can be a confusing, defeating and fatal ecosystem of food and choice.

FEAST, formerly known as Groceryships, is a grantee of The Good People Fund, which has supported the expansion of the wellness program and outreach to New York City.

“This is a program that is changing lives and futures in a holistic way,” said Dana Rizer, FEAST’s executive director, who has a Master’s degree in Food Studies from New York University and co-authored the organization’s curriculum with FEAST founder, Sam Polk. “With Good People Fund support, we expect that our impact in New York will continue to grow.”

The graduation in East Harlem in the spring was one of three that took place in New York, along with one in Brooklyn and one in Queens that collectively recognized 30 participants.  At PS 112, where the program took place and where most of the participants have children attending school, some students celebrated with their parents.

One participant, a mother of two pre-teenage boys, said the program had done nothing less than enhance family dynamics and connection as she discusses food choices with her sons, goes food shopping with them, and makes eating together a more communal and regular affair.

“We are having conversations at home now about what we are eating and why we are eating it,” she said. “And we are sitting around the family table more now sharing food and stories, and my older son wants to even do some of the cooking now. It’s been transformative in ways I couldn’t have seen.”

To FEAST, that is, in fact, the entire point, recognizing that food can and should be a connector within families and communities, with the power to sustain, nourish and strengthen not just the person consuming it.

The challenges are enormous, Rizer said, as people’s food choices are so often mired in culture, income status, fads, body image, family history, and, especially in economically challenged areas, all-important access.

“Thanks to the success of food marketers and lobbyists, the overall system is set up so that people too often are misinformed, and fail to know how to make the right choices,” she said.

“We are trying to break through that, not only through education but also through a deliberate support system that allows participants to set goals and come back every week to report back, celebrate successes and troubleshoot problem areas. Taken together, it makes an enormous difference with numerous ancillary benefits.”

Tom Colicchio, the celebrity chef and restaurant owner, who has been an outspoken advocate in communities and on Capitol Hill for food justice issues and for the FEAST approach to food education, attended the East Harlem event to underscore his support for the grassroots work that is often necessary in economically challenged neighborhoods.

“FEAST is the missing link in just so many ways here and elsewhere,” he said. “We are two generations removed from the Depression, when our grandparents and great-grandparents cooked everything.  Now we are around fast food and convenience stores and no one knows how to find the proper food and cook it.

“But once you know how to cook, then you can stretch the dollar, know what healthy means, and make better choices and have an impact on yourself and your family and its health.  It’s a way to take control and take back a piece of your life. This program is making that happen.”

Graduates of the East Harlem program said they will remain a support group beyond FEAST, yet another trickle-down benefit from their months-long class.

“We have come together and supported each other through change,” said one. “There’s no telling what we can do to improve others’ lives too.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund