by Willy Franzen on January 25, 2009
I’m sure that all of you learned the story of Helen Keller in elementary school, but just to refresh you she was a woman who overcame growing up both blind and deaf in the late 1800s to graduate from Radcliffe College magna cum laude. These days that would still be impressive, but it’s amazing that she did that when she did it. (She had a tutor spell textbooks letter by letter into her hand.) After graduating from college, Helen Keller made it her life’s work to help blind and deaf-blind people. She founded Helen Keller International in 1915, and it has been “devoted to fighting and treating preventable blindness and malnutrition” ever since.
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by Willy Franzen on January 18, 2009
Today’s non-profit has a lot in common with us. They’re all about “youth development,” and I guess you could say that we are too. Juma Ventures is based out of Oakland, CA and Washington, DC, and they “operates businesses – known as “social enterprises” – for the purpose of providing job opportunities to economically disadvantaged teens.” Beyond providing jobs, they also empower “youth with financial education and savings programs, college & career exploration, and essential life skills.” It almost sounds like the offline version of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com + OneDayOneJob.com. Every year Juma Ventures works with 100s of 16-19 year olds from San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and Washington DC’s most impoverished neighborhoods. They’re a non-profit that uses for-profit businesses to accomplish their mission, and they seem to be having great results. Maybe we should try to find a way to get our job search training course into their curriculum.
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by Willy Franzen on December 21, 2008
I’m back home for the holidays, and I hope most of you now are too. It’s wonderful to always have a safe place to go back to, but not everyone is so lucky. Victims of crime and abuse often don’t have anywhere to go. They’re often left with the choice of living in terror in a place that is familiar yet unsafe, or facing total uncertainty. Safe Horizon is a non-profit organization whose mission “is to provide support, prevent violence, and promote justice for victims of crime and abuse, their families, and communities.” They run 80 programs which “are located throughout the five boroughs of New York City in court houses, police precincts, schools, shelters, and community offices.” They may not be able to provide a safe place to go for all 350,000 victims whom they work with each year, but they find a way to support these people until they can find their way to a safe horizon.
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by Willy Franzen on November 29, 2008
My thoughts about Thanksgiving are still lingering like leftovers in the fridge, so we’re going to look at some more turkey related jobs today. The National Wild Turkey Federation is a “non-profit conservation and education organization with a mission dedicated to conserving wild turkeys and preserving hunting traditions.” They’re not talking about the turkeys that you had for dinner (at least not most of you), these are the ones that you may have seen in your backyard. It wasn’t too long ago that seeing a wild turkey was a rare occurrence, but these days it seems like they’re all over the place. That doesn’t mean that the work of the National Wild Turkey Federation is done, though. In fact, their numbers are expanding faster than those of wild turkeys. Since the Federation was founded in 1973, wild turkey numbers have increased from 1.3 million to more than 7 million, in the same time the Federation has grown from 1,300 members to almost half a million. That’s called success.
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by Willy Franzen on November 16, 2008
How many of you participate in book discussion groups? I’ve never been a part of one, but I had a class in college that might as well have been one. It was one of my favorite classes, and it never seemed to drag by like many lectures did. We had the specific goal of discussing and understanding issues relating to “Values in the Law, Economic, and Industrial and Labor Relations.” At the surface the material that we covered often seemed to have nothing to do with subject matter of the class, but as we started to dig deeper it often became apparent that almost anything could be related to the class title. Group discussion is a fantastic way to learn, and it’s no surprise to me that a Chicago based non-profit organization called Literature for All of Us has used book discussion groups to reach out to teen mothers and other youths from underserved neighborhoods. By reading the same books and then sharing reactions to the material, participants are able to engage with issues that they would probably never comfortably address in a classroom setting.
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by Willy Franzen on November 2, 2008
Last weekend we talked about Harlem Success Academy and how they’re making huge strides in educating children from low-income families. What happens at school is extremely important when it comes to educational outcomes for children, but what happens at home can be just even more important. AchieveAbility is a Philadelphia based non-profit organization that is “working to permanently break the cycle of poverty for single parent, low income, formerly homeless families through education, supportive services, community and economic development, housing and accountability.” By helping low-income parents achieve their dreams, AchieveAbility is paving the way for a brighter future for both the parents and the children.
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by Willy Franzen on October 12, 2008
Although you may not realize it, but most college students return home after they graduate. Don’t believe me? Check out this article that says that 58% of you will return home and 32% of you will stay for more than a year. Although it may not be your desired outcome, it’s nice to have a place to stay and get settled before you start life in the real world; in fact, it’s a luxury. There are a lot of people and families who are left without a home, education, or a job and need a place to settle for a bit. They don’t have their parents’ house to go back to, and they don’t know where to go or what to do. If they’re in the Bronx, they can go to Citizens Advice Bureau, a settlement house. What’s a settlement house? You’ll get the full story in the Wikipedia entry on the settlement movement.
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by Willy Franzen on October 5, 2008
As we grow up and start looking for our first jobs, we often fail to realize how easy we had it. Although good grades and getting into college are important, almost all seniors and new grads who are looking for an entry level job never had to worry about survival. It was a given. I’m sure that there are some of you reading who had very different experiences, but most of you are now facing the most distressing times of your lives – entering the real world. It’s easy to forget that there are millions of children in the world who live each day trying to survive. Save the Children is an international non-profit organization that focuses almost entirely on making the lives of children across the world better. They do so with a focus on 7 main areas: Economic Opportunities, Education, Emergencies, Protection, Health, Hunger and Malnutrition, and U.S. Literacy and Nutrition. Save the Children has spent the last 70 years fighting poverty’s effects on children through their unique self-help approach, and they’re not stopping any time soon.
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by Willy Franzen on September 28, 2008
Maybe it’s just me, but I hate walking by people who are begging for money. It always feels like a can’t win situation. I want to help the people, but I don’t like the idea that the money is probably going to help feed a dangerous addiction. The imposition makes me feel uncomfortable, and I also don’t want to get suckered by one of those fake homeless people whom you see on tv – the ones who tv stations catch clearing hundreds of dollars a day and then driving back to their homes. In the end, I always end up feeling bad, whether I give money or not. Street Sense is a non-profit organization that takes a creative approach to helping homeless people whether they’ve been begging on a street corner or just trying to find a job. They’ve created a win-win situation.
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by Willy Franzen on August 16, 2008
Did any of you hear James Blake’s rant on sportsmanship in the Olympics? The man has a point. Tennis is a gentleman’s (gentleperson’s?) game and sportsmanship is an essential part of the sport. That’s probably why Tenacity, a non-profit organization, has chosen tennis as a means of transforming youth, building community, and introducing life skills and literacy. Their motto is “Game. Set. Life.” and we think that it’s quite fitting. We hope that Tenacity is not only transforming youth into literate young adults with great life skills, but also into young adults who will fess up when a ball grazes their rackets.
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by Willy Franzen on August 9, 2008
John James Audubon painted birds. His seminal work, Birds of America, was a collection of 435 life-size prints. To this day, when you hear the name Audubon, you think of birds. Interestingly enough, John James Audubon had no direct involvement with the founding of the National Audubon Society. Audubon’s widow, Lucy, tutored a man named George Bird Grinnell and some of Audubon’s love of birds must have rubbed off, as Grinnell was one of the Audubon Society’s founders. To this day, the Audubon Society persists in its mission “to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological diversity.” The Audubon Society works to achieve this mission through a national network of community-based nature centers and chapters and scientific, educational, and advocacy programs.
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by Willy Franzen on July 20, 2008
Hopelink is a non-profit organization that serves homeless and low income families, children, seniors and people with disabilities. Their goal is to promote self-sufficiency among these people by providing emergency and social services in:
North and East King County, Washington between the I-90 corridor to the Seattle city limits and the Snohomish County line, and from the shores of Lake Washington to the Crest of the Cascades, an area of 800 square miles.
Hopelink offers help to people in the areas of Food, Housing, Child Care, Family Development, Adult Education, Transportation, Interpreter Services, Financial Assistance, Energy Assistance, and Classes. The end result is often a story like this. That’s just one family that was touched by Hopelink – the story in numbers from just last year are awe inspiring (50,000 lives touched for starters).
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by Willy Franzen on July 19, 2008
If you’ve ever been in New York City on a 100 degree day, you know it’s not the best place for your lungs. The air is thick and hard to breathe, the smell of the streets is downright disgusting, and the only respite is when you walk by the occasional open door of an establishment that has its air conditioning pumped up to the max. It’s not a good place for a kid to spend the summer – especially if that kid has asthma or other pulmonary problems (which are much more frequent for city children). That’s why The Fresh Air Fund, a not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer vacations in the country to more than 1.7 million children from disadvantaged communities in New York City since 1877.
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