Charlotte Observer
Posted: Friday, Jan. 13, 2012
Fannie Flono
Three local stories converged for me this week that may lighten your spirit and inspire you as the New Year starts. They did for me.
The first started at my hair stylist’s.
Charlie Clark, my hairdresser, is also president of a group of golfers – 40-plus in number – called the Par Busters. The Par Busters aren’t just a social club, they’re actively engaged in philanthropic and community efforts.
The Par Busters last year became involved in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ Reid Park Academy. For Thanksgiving and Christmas, they adopted five families with children attending the school – providing food, clothing and toys in partnership with the Care to Share Outreach Center. The men plan to become lunch buddies with the students, and the group is trying to set up a junior golf program there.
Why are they doing all this for Reid Park? “Our clubhouse is in the area,” Clark said, “and we wanted to help.”
On Tuesday night, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board heard about a lot of other people who want to help Reid Park.
They’re part of an extraordinary public-private venture called the Reid Park Collaborative Initiative. The initiative, a pilot project, will do something that I – and a lot of other people – have advocated for years: It will provide “a cohesive and accessible” range of services and resources that low-income and other at-risk students often desperately need to succeed.
It’s the kind of holistic approach to helping students in challenging circumstances that Geoffrey Canada and his much-touted Harlem Children’s Zone uses. It recognizes, as Reid Park principal Mary Sturge emphasized Tuesday, that an “effective teacher is not enough” to help all children reach their potential. It does indeed take a community.
Sturge noted that effective teachers have brought Reid Park a long way. The high-poverty school that became one of CMS’s pre-kindergarten through eighth grade schools this year has gone from 18 percent of students performing on grade level to 51 percent during Sturge’s tenure. But to make further progress, more is required, she said.
So last February, planning began on a model to do more. What has emerged is a program to provide wraparound services for 150 of the school’s 800 or so students – those most in need – and their families. It involves a range of partner agencies including the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services, the Council for Children’s Rights and Communities in Schools. It also involves support from myriad volunteers and nonprofits. In all, 50 to 60 agencies and groups have committed to provide a “system of care” framework of support to meet the academic, emotional and physical needs of students and their families.
The system aims to maximize the involvement of all the people who know and care for a child, and the volunteers who are already helping. It also emphasizes what successful models of educating children continue to show – the need for coordinated, community-wide strategies.
It also highlights this – that “philanthropic” efforts to address needs don’t have to involve people with large amounts of money. That’s something I heard again on Wednesday at a YWCA breakfast meeting discussing a new local book, “Giving Back: A Tribute to Generations of African American Philanthropists.”
A panel of givers at the Y breakfast highlighted the breadth and depth of such giving. It included people of means such as attorney Rob Harrington and retired educator Jeanne Brayboy, but also a young entrepreneur, Rashad Davis, founding member of the New Generation of African American Philanthropists giving circle, and 18-year-old college student Olivia Stinson, founder of PEN Pals Book Club, a support group for children with incarcerated parents – an idea that grew out of her church’s Christmas giving to children with incarcerated parents. Astoundingly she started that effort at age 14.
Author Valaida Fullwood said she wrote the already nationally praised book (the Light Factory’s Charles W. Thomas took the photos) to honor philanthropy that doesn’t often get recognized and to inspire more people to embrace philanthropy. Communities benefit from it, she said.
They do. Charlotte is “rich” with givers. But more are needed. This year, become a philanthropist too.
Copyright 2012 . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Fannie Flono is an Observer associate editor. E-mail: fflono@charlotteobserver.com.
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/01/13/2922313/try-being-a-philanthropist-this.html#storylink=cpy
