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Category Archives: Community Services
Protected: Community Service – Operation Exodus in Washington Heights DRAFT
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Hempstead Rebirth’s Virtual Mentorship
When Hempstead Rebirth went from store to store along Hempstead Village- from printing shops to Latino and Caribbean eateries- it found that business owners were glued to their stores. They could not afford to leave their businesses for moments on end. With the Roosevelt Field Mall eight minutes away looming as a threat to their sales, Hempstead Rebirth felt that small business owners needed a business know-how resource. They bridged the gap with mentorship; the kind that has to be logged into.
Hempstead Rebirth is a faith-based 501 ©3 not-for-profit formed in June of 2000 by Pastor Curtis Riley of the Reigning in Life Training Center. The organization’s headquarters on Fulton Avenue serves as a classroom, an office, and a church. First created to target affordable housing, it has since grown as an education hub, holding seminars on financing, business, food and fitness to name a few. It even held an extreme ride event as part of its Youth Initiative Program. On October 28th, Rebirth partnered with Better Business Builders in Hempstead and launched an online business mentoring institute but they are facing the challenge of the next phase: showing owners the value in the program.
Throughout Rebirth’s community service initiatives, mentorship is a mainstay. Sharla Hart, 29, the Director of Food and Fitness, said that “education is a big part of it” and that it is not enough to give people information without showing them how to apply it. “We really want to make it interactive,” she said. They invite the neighborhood to seminars, most of them free, to calculate its caloric intake and learn how to cook with whole foods and spices in live demonstrations. Hart said that the Food and Fitness ties in with business. “Without health you can’t do anything,” she said. “Health impacts your bottom line.” Hart said that the challenge is getting people to fill the seats.
Hempstead Rebirth decided that online mentoring would be more convenient for small business owners. It partnered with James Nemley at Better Business Builders, a certified economic development professional, who delights in the popular phrase, “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” Together, they created an online institute that falls under the Business Mentorship Program (BMP) of the organization. Wanda B. Jones, the Director of the BMP, said that this corporate mentoring is geared towards owners currently in business or starting up.
To advertise the institute, Jones sends an email to existing and potential members of Hempstead Rebirth. The 1,300-word email includes pricing and all of the services they offer. An applicant signs up and is assigned a mentor based on their specific needs. For example, if an owner needs help with bookkeeping, an accounting mentor has them send what they have and they work on it, sending it back and forth. Mentees also have the option of attending live webinars. They are granted full 365-day access to videos, templates, and coaching for $97 a month. Rebirth offers a $5000 scholarship draw for group coaching if requested by the applicant. Nemley is one of the coaches who normally charges $2,500 to $5,000 to speak at events. They started empowerment seminars as far back as 2012 to show the community what they had to offer before launching the institute.
The link Jones provides takes mentees to Xtra Ordinary Business Builders where Nemley seems to be the point person. There are a few other websites run by different hosts that have the same layout as this site. Target Marketing Academy is run by Dan Murray and The Astute Marketing Academy is run by Brian Duckworth. What brings all of these institutes together is the E-Learning Marketing System by Karl Bryan, a leader of global consulting. Bryan admits he borrowed the foundation for this system by combining business models of several top marketing gurus. The program is created for joint-venture: a coach links up with a high-network organization, such as Hempstead Rebirth, and shares the profits. Coaches are encouraged to clone the program and name it; they have done so as far as Australia. Rebirth realized that Hempstead Village did not have anything like this for small business owners.
Online mentoring is not foreign. Score.org provides an email mentor for business finance, accounting, and strategy to name a few. They offer full access to templates, tutorials, and live webinars, such as how to get the neighborhood aware of a small business through direct mail. They are supported by the U.S. Business Administration and have 13,000 volunteers, as well as 348 chapters, allowing them to provide all of their services for free. The closest chapter to Hempstead Village is located in Hauppauge, 21 miles away. Xtra Ordinary Business Builders is the closest location for face-to-face coaching.
Jones said that the challenge will be getting people to sign up. Rebirth is uninterested in just doling out information and will remain an interactive organization. Jones said it is best explained by the proverbial saying: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; Show him how to catch a fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
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Tagged Hempstead Rebirth, Hempstead Village, Nirvani Harriram
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Parkchester Food Pantry Fights to Continue Service
Black shopping bags lay on the table in the middle of Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church’s auditorium. Evelyn McCatty and her staff of three volunteers prep the last of the bags to place on the table before they open the doors. Outside the church, people started to form a line around seven am. They wait until the doors open at eight with the hope of leaving with one of the bags filled with food. This is one stop of many in the quest to feed their families.
Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church is located at 1891 McGraw Ave in Parkchester in the Bronx. The church’s food pantry began serving families in need in the mid-1970s. “Originally we were able to serve people based on their family size, but now because of our limited budget we only give out one bag of food which is really not enough for a family,” said McCatty. Funding for the pantry began to decline about three years ago. As a result, the number of families seeking service decreased as well.
McCatty began volunteering in the Food Pantry in 1986 when the funding was in its glory. At that time, the pantry underwent a restructuring that made it into the organization it is today. Since then, she has focused on taking the necessary steps to maintain service to the community. One of those steps included changing the way they assist those in need.
In order to insure continuous service, Saint Paul’s is a member of the Food Bank of America and is supervised by the United Way that assists them with managing their state money. Organizations like the Food Bank of America and United Way typically distribute the donations it receives to the food pantries. These alliances are necessary for the pantry’s survival because it is not an independent entity, but a part of the church.
“We can’t get to many private foundations directly because we are under the church’s 501C3. The pantry does not have an independent 501C3,” said McCatty. “Private corporations usually will not fund church pantries, but they do fund directly through the Food Bank or United Way.”
“If a person is here for the first time we service them. If the people have been here before we tell them to come every other month in order to give other families a chance to be serviced,” said McCatty. The volunteers log in the names and of address of each person given food in order to keep track. The staff began to do this because in the past they ran out of food within two to three weeks of a single month. This would cause them to close for one-two weeks out of the month because they only receive food deliveries once a month.
The volume of food received in a single delivery depends on their working budget. The church is a member of Thriving for Lutherans an organization that helps Lutheran churches secure funding. Through this association, McCatty obtains the budget from government grants such as, state grants received through the Department of Health and a city grant through the Department of Human Services; Food Group. Private donations make up a small portion of funding with Ridgewood Savings Bank being their major donator.
The food pantry uses the combination of public and private funding to stay in the best shape possible for the people they help. Saint Paul’s doses not exclude anyone and the pantry is open to all who come. “We don’t just provide for people in zip code 10462. We get a lot of people from zip code 10473 and, occasionally, we get people that do not reside in the borough,” said McCatty. According to the Social Explorer, zip code 10462, that includes the Parkchester neighborhood, has a median salary of $50,000. Zip code 10473, which is in community board 9 along with 10462, has a median salary of $40,000. A look at the housing set up supports this data because there are eight public housing projects for low income families in zip code 10473.
The number of total families coming to the pantry dropped because the resources available declined. Saint Paul’s now finds it is helping more singles than families. “You see there are more than one pantry around. So people go from pantry to pantry,” said McCatty. People are resorting to this tactic because much of the federal funding has gotten cut.
The cutback on the amount of federal funding caused a major dilemma for food pantries. “State grants three years ago totaled $18,000. Last year it got cut down to $8, 000,” said McCatty. She currently does not know what the future will bring for the pantry. The only hope she has in continuing to work and make the right decisions at the right time. She alluded to the fight her clients face and why they must go from pantry to pantry in order to eat. “We are currently operating on a budget of about $25,000. You can’t buy much food with $25, 000,” said McCatty.
Evelyn McCatty, Director of Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church’s Food Pantry
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Changing Times For A Volunteer Ambulance Corps
Looming in the shadow of the LIRR trestle, sits what used to be Forest Hills’ most prominent community service, the Forest Hills Volunteer Ambulance Corps, or FHVAC. The single-story building housing the corps, located at 92-29 Metropolitan Avenue, is the second location of the forty-year-old organization, and most passersby don’t think twice about the unimpressive structure or the hardworking volunteers within. Back in the seventies, FHVAC experienced an unbridled rise in communal esteem, a night rarely passed without Forest Hills 1 darting out of the brown garage, sirens shrieking.
The creation of the Forest Hills Volunteer Ambulance Corps was instigated by unreliable municipal, emergency medical care. Throughout the seventies, eighties, and most of the nineties, city ambulances were contracted out to The New York City Health and Hospital Corporation. Communication was poor within this system, and initially, relied on manual operators to connect emergency calls, delaying response times. The average city ambulance arrived to emergencies twenty to thirty minutes after distress calls were made. Felix Cabrera, an EMT, crew chief, and four-year member of FHVAC, said, “After FHVAC was created… [ambulance] response times dropped to three to four minutes in the Forest Hills area.”
Up until the late nineties, the Forest Hills Volunteer Ambulance Corps was the main provider of emergency medical services in Forest Hills, but in 1997, Mayor Rudy Giuliani awarded the FDNY oversight of all city ambulances. With the resources of one of the most respected organizations in the world, the city finally offered reliable emergency medical care. Cabrera said, “The fire department taking over EMS hurt us because the city could actually respond to calls rapidly.” He continued, “but when they cut us off from their radio-dispatch… That really hurt us.” Cabrera refers to the FDNY removing “vollies” from their CAD (dispatch) system in 2010, making the existence of volunteer ambulance corps, within the city, superfluous.
In the three years since the FDNY cut-off volunteer ambulances from their dispatchers, rumors have spread throughout the “volly” system about ambulance corps shutting down. One member of a volunteer ambulance corps said, “Glendale [Volunteer Ambulance Corps] has no money, and Corona [Volunteer Ambulance Corps] has legal trouble. It’s starting to look like dominos.”
Despite the dismal outlook on the future of ambulance corps in New York City, members of the FHVAC are not concerned about the future their organization. Unlike most of their sister corps, FHVAC has accepted the FDNY “isolating” themselves, and manages to stay financially viable and relevant in their community by nurturing a relationship with the local 112th Precinct.
“We’re not totally cut off here,” Joe Cannova, a volunteer dispatcher said. Forest Hills’ dispatchers and ambulance crewmembers can listen and even respond to NYPD dispatchers, something no other ambulance corps is privileged to. “The local 112th Precinct gives us their radio frequency because… we’re the local community guys. They want us at their calls.” added Cabrera, the six-year EMT.
Other FHVAC volunteers attribute the relationship between the volunteer ambulance corps and the NYPD to the identical credentials of “vollies” and FDNY EMTs. “We have the same EMT certification that those EMTs have—nothing different,” Jeremy Davis, a three-year member of FHVAC and EMT, said. It’s true all EMTs in New York State must pass the same state final, but FDNY EMTs undergo an additional three months of training at an FDNY facility. Davis claims that the NYPD doesn’t care who shows up to emergencies, as long as they have a New York State EMT certification.
Due to an influx of calls coming from the NYPD, FHVAC manages to stay busy, but still has been forced to adjust some of the ways they generate revenue. FHVAC used to only ask for donations from patients and the community. But now, the organization implements third-party billing. “We only bill patients if it won’t affect them in anyway,” said EMT Davis. “If they don’t have insurance or can’t afford it, they’ll only get a one-time call asking for a donation.”
Davis and Cabrera, like the other fifty active FHVAC members, are on several of the organization’s committees. Cabrera heads the youth outreach program, while both EMTs lend their medical expertise at community events, like the Metropolitan Avenue Fourth of July Parade and the Austin Street Fair. According to the two veteran EMTs, being active participants in community events helps maintain FHVAC’s bond with the NYPD, but the two volunteers also acknowledge personal bonds as well. Cabrera said, “They know us. That’s why they want and like having us at their calls.” Davis, his partner, added, “We see the same guys all the time. We know them and they know us.”
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