Grantee Focus

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 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

David Baskin, left, and Ilan Kedar, co-founders of Ani Shlishi, in front of the organization’s new secondhand clothing store in Tel Aviv before it opened in the spring.

There’s a new shop selling clothes on Tel Aviv’s busy Allenby Street.  Ordinarily, that’s not so remarkable, but upon closer look, this one is.  It has a mission:  uplifting lives and community.

Ani Shlishi, it’s called.  In English, that translates to “I am third.”  Signs within the store, like the artful one near the register, go deeper.  “First comes the greater good, the welfare of others is second, and I am Third,” it reads.

Ask David Baskin, the Chicago-raised, 28-year old CEO of Ani Shlishi, and he’ll tell you about Ross Freeland, his teacher and baseball coach at Evanston Township High School. He repeated and lived these words, until his death in 2016, instilling in his students a sense of individual sacrifice for the good of others and community.

“It was the idea of being a selfless, generous, kind person, with responsibility to others, whether through the prism of being a teammate on a baseball team or just as a human being,” Baskin said. “That never left me.”

In fact, this brick-and-mortar retail store, which opened in a 55-square-meter space in the spring, is the face of a non-profit organization of the same name.

Ani Shlishi collects secondhand clothes for resale, employs at-risk Israeli youth along the operational chain to give them marketable skills and a future, and uses sales proceeds to fund vocational training scholarships for them and other youth similarly situated on an at-risk spectrum that includes poverty, drug use and homelessness.

The Good People Fund is partnering with the organization with a grant for stipends for young Israelis working at the new store.

“For many of them, this is the first time they have the validation that they can actually be someone,” Baskin said.  “We are giving them permission to dream of infinite possibilities.  Everyone wants to be someone, but not until now has anyone given them that encouragement.”

Ani Shlishi originated in 2016 when Baskin, a lone soldier in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), noticed that other soldiers – like him finishing their service – were discarding piles of clothes and other usable items before leaving the kibbutzim where they were housed.   He started collecting them for donation to orphanages and other agencies dedicated to underserved populations, and saw first hand how peoples’ lives can be changed by small acts.

Soon, he teamed with his friend and former superior officer in the IDF, Ilan Kedar, who was then working in Israel’s booming high-tech sector, and the two began scouring Tel Aviv for secondhand or never-used clothing to keep up a steady stream of donations.

“David’s entire two-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv was stacked with the clothing we were getting,” said Kedar, 27, now Ani Shlishi’s COO.   “We would spend hours and hours all night long going through them to decide what to donate or recycle.  It was intense. What we were doing became a part of us and we knew it was making a difference.”

In less than a year, the pair was running pop-up secondhand shops throughout Tel Aviv, selling collected clothing and using proceeds to help at-risk youth in the city.  Soon, they had an established stall at Tel Aviv’s bustling Shuk HaCarmel, where Ani Shlishi’s visibility and sales soared and the need for a more traditional and roomy retail store became apparent.

The two view the store as a multifaceted center of doing good, touching everyone from those who enter it with bags of donated clothing, and customers who are supporting community, to at-risk youth working there, gaining self-worth and new skills, and those getting vocational training through Ani Shlishi scholarships.

“We are breaking cycles of poverty and inertia, and everyone having anything to do with this is contributing to that,” Baskin said, pointing out a sign hanging in the store that declares in Hebrew, “if you purchased, you donated.”

Already, Ani Shlishi made it possible for a 17-year-old at-risk youth to enroll in a program to become a professional lifeguard, typically a stable and well-paid vocation in Israel.    And another, age 15, disengaged from his family and with a history of drug dealing, is now tapping into his dancing talents and taking a course with the intention of becoming an instructor himself.

“To us, this might not be a big deal, but to them, these sparks are a very big deal,” Kedar said. “They are not finishing high school and they are not going to college.  They need something practical as a path to self-sustainability.  With a skill, they can give back and feel of value.  That is huge.”

Back at the store, Baskin was inspecting a few dozen bags of donated clothing that would be sorted for either sale, further donation, or recycling.   He himself was an admittedly “troubled” teenager, marked by a period of aimlessness and some brushes with the law, his path corrected with support of family, educational opportunities and IDF service.

“Like every single item in our store that was cast away and is now finding its rightful home, these at-risk kids are the same,” Baskin said. “The mainstream systems aren’t for them, they need something a little unique and we try to help them find their way and their place.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund