Jewish Community Hero Award

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Share this / Pass it around , I appreciate your support.
Iray

www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/ind...iana




"The Jewish Community Hero Award honors those making strides to repair the world, starting in their own communities. Nominate someone in your community and come back often to vote for your favorite nominees."
[ www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/con...main ; ]

www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/ind...iana


When does voting open? How do I vote?
Voting is open now through October 8. Click here to browse and vote for Heroes.
What criteria will be used to pick the Hero of the Year and additional honorees?
The essential criteria will be:

1. The nominee shows exceptional qualities and commitment in line with the mission of UJC/Jewish Federations of North America, strengthening the Jewish community, and the ideals of tikkun olam.
2. The nominee complies with the rules of the Jewish Community Heroes campaign.

What will honorees receive?
The Hero of the Year will be provided with $25,000 to be used as an investment in their community project or non-profit effort via his or her local Jewish Federation, or another recognized 501(c)3 charitable entity or Canadian equivalent, and he or she will be invited to and recognized at next year's General Assembly. The remaining four finalists will receive a smaller amount to be used as an investment in their community project or non-profit effort via their local Jewish Federations, or recognized 501(c)3 charitable entities or Canadian equivalent.

www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/pag...bout

Community Center of St. Bernard

Community Center of St. Bernard www.CCSTB.org

I arrived as a volunteer in New Orleans from NH January 2006, expecting to stay only about 3 weeks. After working at the Made With Love Cafe and seeing first-hand the devastation,I made a long-term commitment to helping with the recovery effort.I have served as volunteer Executive Director of the Community Center since its inception in April, 2006,I also serve as Vice-Chair of Unified Nonprofits of Greater New Orleans, Vice-Chair of St. Bernard Community Recovery and am a member of St. Bernard Parish Citizens Recovery Committee.
Iray


COMMUNITY CENTER OF ST BERNARD
1107 LeBeau Street CellPhone: (504) 617- 2580
Arabi LA 70032 Phone: (504) 281- 2512
www.CCSTB.org Fax: (916) 675- 7827

The Community Center of St Bernard is located in St. Bernard Parish, directly next door to New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward, at the epicenter of devastation from Hurricane Katrina. We are a community based grassroots 501 (c) (3) nonprofit that strives to meet the needs of hurricane survivors in St Bernard Parish and surrounding areas. Our mission is to empower residents seeking to rebuild their lives and their communities by providing them with local access to the recovery resources they need in a safe and all-inclusive environment.

We address emergency needs immediately through our Mustard Seed Distribution program (Food Pantry, Clothing Bank), and hot meals. Other direct services include free internet, computer classes, faxing and phone service to enable residents to seek employment, keep in contact with family members now scattered across the country, and find applicable federal, state and local aid programs. And in collaboration with partner agencies, we provide local access to free medical care, legal aid, housing assistance, case management, prenatal care, socialization opportunities (dances, community celebrations, workshops), disability advocacy, senior citizen employment training, and stress reduction resources from across the greater New Orleans area.

The Community Center is dedicated to serving the least well-off and the disenfranchised who are still struggling to recover more than 3 years after Katrina. During 2008 our Mustard Seed Food Pantry gave out 245,787 lbs of food to 2,033 unique low-income families. Those families included 1,797 children ages 17 & under. Many of these are among the most vulnerable of members of the community. 43% of these families have a head of household who is unemployed; 31% contain a physically or mentally disabled individual; 29% are headed by single parents. And 98% of these families are making less than $25,000 per year. In fact, 62% of them are struggling to survive on less than $10,000 annually.

Unfortunately the current economic crisis is taking a terrible toll on these low-income families. At the Community Center, our staff are now processing up to 10 intake requests every day for the Mustard Seed Food Pantry, as compared to about 2 requests daily a year ago this time. During January 2009 alone, 243 new households met the income requirements (total income less than 130% of the federal poverty limit) to be added to our client list. This is more than double the 116 new households who qualified during the previous month (December 2008).

Typical among these new clients are people like Rebecca Muscarello, a Food Pantry participant whose story was featured in the New York Times. Ms Muscarello had made a good living as a secretary, so she never imagined that at age 35 she would be left with no choice but to take her two young children to a food pantry to get groceries. But like a growing number of Americans whose jobs have evaporated in a shrinking economy, Ms. Muscarello ran out of money and then food, so she turned to the Community Center in order to feed herself and her children (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11...11FOOD.html

The need for other basic services provided by the Community Center is equally urgent:
• Every week more than 200 families get free clothes at the Mustard Seed Clothing Bank.
• During 2008, the Community Center served 3,855 free hot dinners & 4,029 free hot lunches.
• The Community Center has 10 public computers with free printing, as well as 3 phones for making free local and long distance phone calls. During October 2008 alone, these computers were used 615 times.
• And during 2008, 142 people have signed up for the free computer classes offered at the Community Center.
• During 2008, the Community Center passed out 27,023 informational flyers, forms and brochures to help clients find the help they needed, including 3,760 applications for Emergency Food Stamps after Hurricane Gustav.
• During this same time, our office staff made 2,399 referrals to help clients find resources and other assistance.
• The 2008 St Bernard Thanksgiving Celebration organized by the Community Center served more than 500 turkey dinners with all the trimmings to area residents.
• And our 2008 Toy GiveAway provided more than 2,000 toys to 685 area children.
More information about the various events presented by the Community Center during 2008 is available at www.ccstb.org/sidebar/news/index.html

However, in order to effectively fulfill our mission of providing necessary recovery services to hurricane survivors, the Community Center goes beyond simply acting as a direct service provider and has developed a unique two-fold approach. We actively work to form strategic alliances with a variety of resource agencies from across the greater New Orleans 5-parish area rather than attempting to meet all needs ourselves. By providing these partner agencies with client-meeting space at our centralized location in St Bernard Parish, the Community Center avoids duplication of services while facilitating the ability of local residents, many of whom still have limited transportation options in the wake of the disaster, to become aware of and access the various types of assistance that are available to them.

Specific partner agencies currently providing services at the Community Center of St Bernard include: New Orleans Legal Assistance Clinic, Daughters of Charity New Orleans (Mom & Baby Mobile Health Clinic), Talk It Out Van, St Anna's Medical Mission, BlueStone Ministries, Families Helping Families of Southeast Louisiana, Louisiana Department of Social Services Office of Family Support (Food Stamps), Louisiana Spirit, Swan River Yoga, Jefferson Parish Council on Aging, Milestones Mental Health Agency, and Road Home. The local need for these services is clearly evidenced by client-participation data. Each month approximately 40 senior citizens seek job training through the Senior Community Service Employment Program, and more than 100 families sign up for the federal food stamps program at the Community Center.

Our networking-based method of providing services allows the Community Center maximal flexibility so that we can readily adapt our available services to meet the changing needs of our clients as the recovery progresses simply by modifying our partner agencies. This regional networking strategy is being developed as a model for other intermediate- to long-term disaster response agencies that need to assist clients after the initial shock of the catastrophe has passed, but while crucial sections of social infrastructure (public transport, schools, libraries, hospitals) are only minimally functional and in the process of being rebuilt.

What is East of New Orleans ?

The media continues to do a great disservice to hurricane victims in the greater New Orleans area by referring to what transpired here as a natural disaster. In truth what happened in this region was not natural, unlike the Hurricane Katrina damage in eastern Mississippi and the Hurricane Rita damage in western Louisiana and Texas. The damage done by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Orleans and St Bernard Parishes of Louisiana was a direct result of the failure of the Federal government's flood control infrastructure (levees and pumps), combined with the fact that the man-made Mississippi Gulf River Outlet (MRGO) served as a deep water conduit and allowed an unimpeded storm surge of up to 30 feet tall to completely inundate everything in its path. The result? Destruction on a scale that passed well beyond disaster and into the realm of the catastrophic. In St Bernard Parish, the epicenter of devastation, fully 93% of owner-occupied homes were rated as "severely damaged" or "destroyed".

Why did this happen? When the Army Corps of Engineers built MRGO they destroyed 168 miles of wetlands and removed 4 natural barriers (ridge lines). Oil and gas companies in the region have also dug numerous canals in the wetlands in their ongoing search for petroleum reserves; these canals are not required to be backfilled when they are taken out of use. Together the canals and MRGO allow the infiltration of brackish Gulf waters which have decimated the once thriving cypress groves that formed a natural barrier between the Gulf of Mexico and the New Orleans region. If the wetlands and cypress groves that existed in 1965 had been intact when Katrina made landfall it never could have caused the horrific destruction that it did in St Bernard Parish and the New Orleans region as a whole.

St. Bernard Parish itself is located directly next to New Orleans lower Ninth Ward. This peninsula is about 3 miles wide by 30 miles long and runs from the Industrial Canal on the Western side to the Gulf of Mexico on the East. It pains me deeply that St Bernard Parish, unlike the lower Ninth Ward, remains all but completely forgotten. This is the only Parish (county) in the history of our country to have been completely inundated by flood waters causing catastrophic devastation, and the Parish was also the site of the Murphy Oil spill (the largest domestic residential oil spill in US history) caused by hurricane damage to the Murphy Oil Refinery. Yet few outside the New Orleans region are even aware that it exists, much less of the ongoing recovery struggle that continues every day here, more than 2 1/2 years after the hurricanes.

The Community Center of St Bernard is a community-based grassroots 501 (c) (3) nonprofit. Our mission is to assist local residents in their return to their homes, and to help normalize life in these trying times. We are dedicated to providing a wide range of necessary community services, including free food, clothes, internet access, free long distance and local phone service, computer classes, hot meals, and community events such as after school programs and workshops.

The Community Center facility also serves as a meeting place for many local groups such as the St Bernard Parish Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Old Arabi Neighborhood Association, Arabi Neighborhood Block Watch and various Masonic lodges. And we actively seek to form collaborations with partner agencies to bring additional needed services to St Bernard Parish residents, including free medical care, legal assistance, crisis counseling, and rent & utility assistance.

More information about the various programs and services available through the Community Center is available at our webpage www.ccstb.org

There remains so much to be done here -- for many of the clients we serve, this is NOT a recovery but merely a later stage in an ongoing crisis. Though numerous celebrities and aspiring politicians (Oprah, Amy Goodman, Brad Pitt) have come as close as New Orleans, they are unlikely to ever venture beyond the Lower Ninth Ward, so they will remain in the dark about the lives and struggles of the people in St Bernard. Thank you for anything you can do to help us - it is much appreciated!



Sincerely
R.M. "Iray" Nabatoff
CCSTBP@yahoo.com
504-617-2580 Cell
504-281-2512 Office
916-675-7827 Fax
ccstb.org

Community Center of St. Bernard lists schedule of upcoming events to be held and assistance offered

Community Center of St. Bernard lists schedule of upcoming events to be held and assistance offered



August 7 , 2007
Steve Cannizaro

The following are the schedule of upcoming events and assistance offered at the Community Center of St. Bernard, 1107 Lebeau St., Arabi, just off St. Claude Avenue, around corner from the new Dollar General Store.

Office & Media lab hours 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Mon - Fri

Tuesday Community Supper / Family movie night
Meal: 5:30 – 7 p.m.; movie begins at 7:30 p.m.

Schedule of community dances held in cooperation with
New Orleans Musicians Clinic:

Aug. 11 Billy Ding and the Hot Wings
Aug. 25 Kaya Martinez Quintet
Sept. 8 Slewfoot , Cary B & Alabama Slim
Sept. 22 Dr. Bones & the Hepcats

Acorn Housing Corporation Assistance with Road Home issues/appeals:
Thursdays 2 - 5 PM
Aug. 16 , 23, 30
Sept. 6, 13, 20, 27

Legal assistance by New Orleans Legal Assistance
& Pro Bono Project, Tuesday, 10 a.m. - 12 noon
Aug. 21
Sept. 4 , 18
Oct. 2, 16, 30
Nov. 6, 20
Dec. 4, 18

sbpg.net/au707b.html

Free legal assistance / assistance with Road Home program

Free legal assistance available Tuesday, July 17 from 9:30-11:30 a.m. at Community Center of St. Bernard at 1107 Lebeau St. in Arabi; assistance with Road Home program offered every Thursday from 2-5 p.m.


July 16, 2007
Steve Cannizaro

The Pro Bono Project in conjunction with New Orleans Legal Aid Clinic will offer a free legal aid clinic on Tuesday, July 17 from 9:30-11:30 a.m. at the Community Center of St. Bernard, 1107 Lebeau St., just off St. Claude Avenue in Arabi.

The clinic will address St. Bernard residents’ legal concerns in the areas of family and consumer law. Clinics are staffed by attorneys and students working in these organizations.

Also, assistance with the Road Home programs from the non-profit group A.C.O.R.N. is offered Thursdays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Community Center, located next to the Andrew Jackson Masonic Lodge.

Officials of the Community Center also said the Andrew Jackson Lodge is working on getting an air-conditioning system running at the center in time for its next Community Dance Series which resumes on Saturday night, July 28.


sbpg.net/jul1607.html

Community Center of St. Bernard Mustard Seed Distribution program announces new director, times / dates for distribution

June 5, 2007
Steve Cannizaro

The Community Center of St. Bernard - Mustard Seed Distribution program,
which distributes household goods, non-perishable foods and hygiene products
to residents while offering specialized equipment for those with special
needs, has a new director and has released dates and times for distribution.

“Mama” Sue Collins, who headed the program for the past 16 months, has left the
project. We want to welcome our new director Martin Huber, a 19-month
veteran of working for those affected by Hurricane Katrina. Huber comes from
N.O where he was a volunteer leader at Hands On New Orleans.

The Mustard Seed operates with goods which are donated to the Community
Center and often acts as a referral service to provide links between
residents and local agencies to address unmet needs.

Distribution of products will be made at the following locations, dates and times:

Community Center of St. Bernard
1107 Le Beau St. in Arabi
Tuesday: Noon to 5 p.m.
Friday: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Mustard Seed Distribution Center
At Camp Hope at the Willie Smith Elementary School in Violet
Thursday: Noon to 5 p.m.
Saturday: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

sbpg.net/jun507a.html

Community Center Family dance series and barbecue dinner

Pictures of the first Community Center Family dance
Saturday May 19

Community Center Family dance series and barbecue dinner

Pictures of the first Community Center Family dance
Saturday May 19

Community Center Family dance series and barbecue dinner

Pictures of the first Community Center Family dance
Saturday May 19

Community Center Family dance series and barbecue dinner

Pictures of the first Community Center Family dance
Saturday May 19