TIGblogs - Group - Rediscover Your Heart awardees

Focus on your ability!

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:55:00 EDT

No matter where we go; either visiting local schools or interviewing a family in need, we tried our best to cheer people on so they can be the best they can be. Chair Advocates is a youth venture located in New York advocating on behalf of people with wide range of physical disabilities. This venture came about when a group of high school and college students saw the need for funding of adaptive equipments or assistive technology in their community. The underlying problem was twofold; many students is either not using an equipment which they should be using or they are using the wrong equipment for their type of disability. Chair Advocates address these problems by offering financial assistance to low income individuals with disabilities and their families and work closely with specialists like occupational therapists and physical therapists to make sure the right equipments are purchased. Asides from approving equipment requests and catering to the needs of individuals with physical disabilities, Chair Advocates is actively involved in promoting disability rights in the New York community and internationally in Kenya.

Chair Advocates first and ongoing project was called Young Wheelers In Need (YWIN) with a focus on teens with physical impairment who are wheelchair-bound ranges from ages 12 to 21. The objective of this project is to raise awareness about available adaptive equipments to promote independence among teens in our community. All YWIN participants are encouraged to advocate for themselves and ask for accommodations whenever needed so they can reach their full potential in school or in the workplace. Other services CA provides include peer mentoring, Starscope newsletter and latest assistive technology updates. So far, Chair Advocates have made many wishes come true by funding for mobility equipments, special assistive aids and adaptive assistive technologies.

On an international scale, Chair Advocates is currently working with AADD (a nonprofit organization in Kenya) on a project called Path To Independence. As a result AADD is able to better serve individuals with disability in Kenya. CA is planning to contribute over a thousand dollars to purchase adaptive equipments for more than 30 PTI members.

As a nonprofit youth venture, we are committed to our cause and look forward to our future years of serving, informing, defending, and inspiring people with physical disability.

For more information regarding Chair Advocates organization and its advocacy projects, please visit our website www.chairadvocates.org.

GREEN FASHION by homeless designers!

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:31:00 EDT

What if someday being decked from head to toe in the latest trends and carrying around a copy of Vogue could send a message to the world that you are green, sustainable, sweatshop free and committed to helping your community?

Fashion gets criticized for being superficial, but people like Lauren Hope Silverstein see the potential it has to be anything but.

Silverstein, who designs for a leading fashion house, recently met with Reciprocity Foundation's students to discuss green fashion and design.

The general feeling in the room was that while we all want to give back and carefully use our precious natural resources, nobody wants to sacrifice on style, and nobody has to.

For young, homeless designers, this conversation was particularly important. Having experienced so much difficulty, these youth know that in order to feel good about their contributions, they want their work to tell their stories and help others.

The reassurance that designing the perfect pair of jeans has the possibility to send a positive message of awareness and change, and keep the planet healthy, further inspired these already motivated young adults.

Reciprocity has been offering training in green and socially responsible start-ups since 2004, long before the trend truly took off, but as Terry Swack of Sustainable Minds pointed out "the challenge is the lack of accessible, easy to use information that design teams can integrate into their processes to design greener products."

Reciprocity is helping to bridge that gap, and by asking practical questions, Reciprocity students are pushing industry professionals to articulate just how we can all work together to make this trend the standard.

Silverstein, for example, is offering students guidance on portfolios, and recently led a Reciprocity project that resulted in the creation of a chic, eye-catching, green, organic, sweatshop-free tote bag, sales of which benefit programming for homeless youth. Now that is one multi-tasking accessory!

For more information check: www.reciprocityfoundation.org

Design Your Future!

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:27:00 EDT

In 2004, Adam Bucko and Taz Tagore made their vision of social change a reality by creating The Reciprocity Foundation. An award winning nonprofit that specializes in helping homeless and low-income youth permanently exit the social service sector and start sustainable careers, Reciprocity’s innovative curriculum gives youth spiritual, psychological, professional, and educational guidance. Perhaps most importantly, Reciprocity embodies the idea of giving back. By placing special focus on careers in the Creative, Green, and Social Entrepreneurship sectors, the entire Reciprocity community, from students, to employees, to volunteers and corporate leaders, works to embody the idea that in order to be successful, one must work for the betterment of both oneself and one’s community.
Reciprocity awakens individual talents, thereby establishing meaningful relationships and a base that will allow each student to re-enter society from a place of strength, passion, and compassion. Experiential learning is a keystone of Reciprocity, with industry leaders providing both guidance and connections.
Reciprocity’s unique methods of working with homeless and low income youth have been widely featured in the press, reaching over 20 million people with the message that it is possible to transform homeless and lower-income youth into creative leaders and change makers (ABC News, CBS News/Logo, Reuters, CW's America's Next Top Model, New York Times, NY Daily News, Metropolis Magazine, Print Magazine, Yoga+ Magazine, and Gay City News). Reciprocity graduates have landed jobs and internships at major Fortune 500 companies (Martha Stewart Omni media, Chaps Ralph Lauren/Warnaco, Young and Rubicam and America's Next Top Model) and have gained admissions to such leading colleges as Parsons/New School University, Fashion Institute of Technology, Babson College, and City University of New York.

Street Chat

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:41:00 EST

We are currently immersed in the planning of our interactive installation, a conversation on the streets of New York called Street Chat. We are waiting for better weather to bring a critical mass of folks back out onto the streets and are aiming to release Street Chat to New York City in early summer, 2009.

In the meantime, we are researching ways to ensure our project welcomes the public and brainstorming the perfect questions to include on our list to give to participants. We've been focusing on the design of the platform for conversation, emphasizing a piece which is both functional and inviting as well as aesthetically pleasing.

Although it may seem as if Street Chat relies heavily on chance by asking the public to take part, we are working to ensure every detail of the project is scrutinized so it will inspire two strangers to feel the freedom to open their hearts to one another.

The second part of our project is a film created from the footage of the street installation. Our goal is to edit the footage ourselves, allowing us to have more creative control over the final film and construct a more authentic record of our project in line with our original vision. Therefore, as part of our preparation we have been honing our video editing skills and acquiring the necessary equipment to do this work.

Look for Street Chat in early summer 2009 on the streets of NYC!

Drop-in Dinners

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:15:00 EST

The Rediscover Your Heart award was exactly what we needed to jump-start our drop-in dinner series. We started hosting drop-in dinners a few years back when we first moved to Brooklyn to meet our neighbors and friends. The idea was straightforward – every other Monday night we cooked and friends and neighbors were welcome to drop by and bring their friends. We never knew who or how many people would show up, but we wanted to create a space where people could feel free to drop in on good food, good people, and good conversation. We wanted to inspire others to host nights as well, but it never quite took off and eventually we stopped hosting.

We always felt that there was something special that happened when people came over to break bread with others. In New York City as in many urban centers, apartments are small and most people go out to socialize. In addition, most people are hyper-scheduled with multiple events, places to go and people to see. They don’t necessarily cook or use their home as a gathering place. What we envisioned is that we let our friends and their friends know that our house will be open on a regular basis – no need to RSVP or plan, if they happen to be in the neighborhood or have a free night or just feel the need for some community or good food, they can come by.

After we received the award, we realized that we needed to revamp the way that we host drop-in dinners. For one thing, we now have a cute young baby, who would not be so happy with dinners that last late into the night. So we decided to switch it up to brunch and to host less frequently. The second thing is that we really want to encourage others to host nights as well. Our big dream is that we inspire so many people that we develop a community in which at least one person is hosting a drop-in dinner every night so that there is always somewhere to go for good company. With the award money, we are trying to provide a little seed money as incentive for others to host events. We have asked our guests for their thoughts on what it means to cultivate a drop-in culture and we will fund at least 10 individuals to host a regular series that will hopefully inspire their guests to host as well.

These pictures are from a recent event – we collected books for prisoners. We ate good food, gathered over 300 quality books, and enjoyed lively debates about the literary merits of various books. Our challenge now is to think about the frequency of gatherings (to make it truly drop-in, we should be hosting every other week, but we’ve only been doing it monthly which makes it more of an “event” versus an informal get-together) and the number of people (at a recent event we had 35 people – which is vibrant and stimulating but we realize is too many to generate quality conversations and connections). So our conception of what a drop-in culture can be continues to evolve.

We’d love to hear your thoughts…

LinkEducation

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:38:00 EST

Last spring I received an award from Rediscover your Heart. I was so happy that I would be able to further my work with LinkEducation (my organization that helps parents and teachers in New York City to find education programs for their students).

Thanks to the Rediscover your Heart award we were able to hold our first Education Expo. It was an event that brought education programs (like art classes, yoga, after school programs, and tutoring) into one room so that parents could find programs for their kids, and so teachers and principals could find low cost or free programs to improve their school.

This first expo turned out to be a huge success! We co-hosted it with the New York City Department of Education, 300 parents and teachers attended, and had so many organizations who wanted to present that we ran out of room!

It was such a success that we are now going to do it twice a year! We have our next expo coming up this April 25th. We have a bigger space so we can now fit 100 booths, and we hope that even more parents and teachers will come this year.

Check out the information on our next expo here: http://www.linkeducation.org/spring_educationexpo

And check out pictures from our last expo here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/LinkEducation/AnnualEducationExpo

Threads That Teach - New York, NY

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:47:00 EST

Threads That Teach aims to help fundraise for inner city public school arts education programs, specifically in New York City. Myself being a product of public school education going on to pursue a career in the arts, it is important to me that future generations have the same opportunities that I had. In recent years, the U.S. government has cut down on the educational budgets allotted for public school education. As a result of these budget cuts, the schools have began to focus more and more on academic subjects that are measured through standardized testing and have cut a significant amount of funding allotted to more creative courses. The arts programs in public schools are slowly shrinking and the resources available to students are less than adequate. The goal of the Threads That Teach Public School Program is to have the students attending these schools help restore their own arts programming budgets through fashion art fundraisers. We do this by bringing in volunteers from local colleges and universities to teach lesson plans covering fashion design, marketing, sales, money management, and entrepreneurship. Through these lessons students are able to create and sell apparel as a fundraiser for the arts program at their respective school.

The Rediscover Your Heart Award has provided our organization with the extra funding needed to expand our programming. This is our first semester operating in two schools at once. Each school has its own unique goal for the program, and thus we have designed two very different curriculums. At one school we are teaching our original curriculum in 3 general education and 2 special education visual arts classes. This curriculum has the students designing the artwork to be printed onto the apparel, but the printing process is then outsourced. At our second school we have created a more hands-on curriculum with a small group of after-school program participants. These students not only sketch the designs to be put onto the apparel, but they also create the apparel itself. Each item is hand-sewn and decorated by the students. This is a new type of curriculum that we would not have had the resources to experiment with if it were not for the Rediscover Your Heart Award. The students seem to really enjoy the complete process of sketching, sewing, and decorating the apparel. Our volunteers also find the change in programming to be refreshing and fun. One volunteer in particular has mentioned that the “arts and crafts type aspect” of the after-school projects make her “feel like a kid again.”

As our program continues to grow, my commitment to our mission only grows stronger. I am constantly working to revise our lesson plans through extensive research of innovative processes used in other educational programs to teach similar concepts. As our volunteer database expands, the recruitment process is getting easier due to anecdotes reporting positive experiences being passed along on college campuses. We recently even had a new school approach us with interest in participating in our program next fall. The visual arts teacher at the school heard about our program from a friend and contacted me via e-mail through our website. The self-promotion of our public school program is extremely motivating and I look forward to seeing how our organizational will grow and evolve over time.