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Monthly Archives: November 2013
Protected: Malverne Civic Association
Posted in Community Services
Tagged John Friia, Malverne Civic Association
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Protected: Neighborhood group sessions Spanish Harlem
Posted in Community Services
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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.
Posted in Community Services
Tagged Hempstead Rebirth, Hempstead Village, Nirvani Harriram
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Deadly Choices at Memorial
The Deadly Choices at Memorial written by Sheri Fink on ProPublica was fair but expressed Fink’s judgment of Dr. Anna Pou’s actions.
Fink captured the devastation of Hurricane Katrina hitting Memorial Medical Center in gripping detail. She involved herself in the investigation of the critically ill evacuees as she writes in first person at times. She was able to portray the irony in decisions that seemed small at the time of their making but that resulted in huge tragedies. In writing about this investigation, she coupled positive information with negatives following, making the piece fair but biased.
The nutgraf of the article shows that she felt the actions of the medical administrators increased the number of deaths at Memorial. She paralleled the actions of a “well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses” to the most deaths- 45 bodies- than any other hospital of the same size. Fink wrote about the night after Katrina hit where the 52 LifeCare patients had not been evacuated and the Coast Guard was denied to take more patients for the night because of poor lighting and infrastructure. Before mentioning this, Fink wrote that the doctors were “under stress and sleeping little.” She said a doctor had ordered a patient’s heart monitor to be turned off and was angry when disobeyed. Although understandable, Fink may suggest that the doctors’ emotional states formed their decision making.
Fink goes farther than putting blame on the group of medical administrators and singles out Dr. Pou. She positively listed the laws and procedures Dr. Pou helped enact after the disaster. She even characterized her as “funny” and “sociable.” Fink injected a negative perspective after mentioning those positives. For example, she said that through her own research, she found that “more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients” than was thought. She later said that “the full details of what Pou did, and why, may never be known.” First she said that many professionals wanted to inject patients but then she pinpoints Dr. Pou as the one who made the game-changing decision.
Fink seemed personally involved in the aftermath of this tragedy. She portrayed the horrors of the storm undoubtedly well. It is both easy and saddening to visualize volunteers carrying “patients who relied on ventilators down five flights of stairs in the dark.” Fink used this information in the piece to paint a picture of the absolutely helpless in the hands of administrators who – quoting one of them- stopped treating and went into survival mode.
Posted in Deadly Choices at Memorial (Fink)
Tagged Deadly Choices at Memorial, 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
Posted in Community Services, Uncategorized
Tagged community service, Earl Mays, Parkchester
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Deadly Choices and Fink
While reading part one of the tribulations at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katarina, investigating journalist Sheri Fink depicts the serve decisions and repercussion doctors made. A reader can feel that Fink showed biasness while writing these pieces, because there are certain parts of the text that indications her resent or misunderstanding of Pou and the other doctors. She included a quote from a doctor stating, “we spend too much on these turkeys… we ought to let them go,” which shows that these doctors are careless and no remorse was shown.
Even though I feel that Fink shows biases and attempts to bring an enlightened view of the events that occurred, as a journalist she also needs to be fair. Within one of the paragraphs, she notes that the beliefs of Pou will never be known but she is active in trying to change emergency protocol. This can show that Pou is regretful for what has happened and she wants to avoid these events from happening again at any hospital.
One of the aspects that are unique about these articles is that Fink takes a topic that many readers are aware of and changes the direction of it. Instead of reporting the events and the transcripts of court cases, she dives into the evidence and talks to people that were at the hospital. Fink takes the reader on journey from the moment the hospital enters Hurricane Katrina to the moments when those deadly decisions were made. She is able to make the reader visualization and feel they were part of the events that happened.
Posted in Deadly Choices at Memorial (Fink)
Tagged John Friia
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Protected: El Puente
Posted in Community Services, Neighborhoods
Tagged Margarita Lappost, Williamsburg
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Protected: Non-Profit Aims to Create an Indo-Caribbean Identity
Posted in Community Services
Tagged Kamelia Kilawan, South Richmond Hill
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“Deadly Choices at Memorial”
In the article, “Deadly Choices at Memorial,” writer, Sheri Fink unveils the events behind the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina that led to the neglect of many hospital patients, which are namely the old, the declining and the most vulnerable. Despite the blame on Anna Pou and the hospital’s decisions, Fink revealed the topic to be a lot more complicated than expected. In details, Fink describes the lack of preparation the hospital had during the tragedy that led to Pou’s controversial decisions. However, despite not clearly placing the blame on Pou, Fink implies that she disagree with the decisions made. Fink had given Pou enough voice in the article to support her argument, but she did not whitewash the horrific results of the dead, helpless corpses that did not deserve to die with neglect. This especially hits hard in the following sentence uttered by one of the doctors:
‘”‘We spend too much on these turkeys,’’ he said some would say. ‘We ought to let them go.’’’
This casual conversation that refers to the patients as “turkeys” waiting to be let go is a harsh portrait of how the decision came to be. It wasn’t a decision that arrived in their minds during the hurricane, but a decision that was looming over their heads.
The eighth paragraph describes Fink’s motivation behind writing the article and the importance of discussing Pou’s decisions despite not fully knowing the full details behind it. And Fink’s motivation is that Pou’s controversial and “agonizing decisions” would arise again. This paragraph immediately shows Fink’s intentions of not simply writing an article that points finger at those she believes were to blame. Instead, Fink wanted to focus the discussion on the events that led to Pou’s decisions so that if ever it arises again, Pou’s argument of lack of preparation would not be tolerated.
Fink does not organize her story chronologically. Instead, she breaks it down by topic that helps the reader analyze the details. By not arranging the story chronologically, Pou is given the chance to voice out her argument without any clear bias against her. Fink finalizes the article with the trial and a profound quote from one of the panelist in the jury:
“‘As bad as disasters are,’’ he said, ‘even worse is survivors who don’t trust each other.'”
By using this quote, Fink shows that the effects of Pou’s decisions goes beyond the death tolls and the families of the patients who were neglected. Her decision led to breaking the crucial bond between survivors, patients and doctors.
Posted in Deadly Choices at Memorial (Fink)
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