Six in the city
Meet six people whose efforts help make Boston a better place
We ring in the new year with news from the Corporation for National and Community Service that adults in America are volunteering at the highest rate -- 27 percent -- in three decades. And today is a day when many of us resolve to do things to improve ourselves and the world around us. Meet six people whose efforts help make Boston a better place.
Karen Kiefer
Karen Kiefer grew up baking Irish soda bread with her mother. When she had four daughters of her own, she passed along the tradition to them. "My mother grew up in Dorchester in a large Irish Catholic family where the currency of the day was bread: feeding the heart and filling the stomach," says Kiefer, who now lives in Wayland.
Then came the terror of 9/11, and Kiefer and her friend Juliette Fay were anxious to do something, anything, to help. They began by baking loaves of bread for firefighters and police officers, getting their children and neighbors involved. But why stop there? Why not expand their project into a nonprofit that would provide bread to the down and out?
Five years later, Spread the Bread has baked and delivered tens of thousands of loaves: banana, cranberry, lemon, whole wheat, challah, bread with nuts and without, in all different shapes and sizes. Each loaf is creatively wrapped with a homemade tag bearing a message from a child. Recipients include veterans and soldiers, shelters, food banks and pantries, Meals on Wheels, Councils on Aging -- anyone in need, says Kiefer, of "bread philanthropy." The organization also collects bread and pastries from corporate donors such as
An important part of Spread the Bread is involving young people in the baking and delivering. "We want the kids to learn how simple it is to make a difference," Kiefer says. Spread the Bread now has a chapter at Boston College, where both Kiefer and Fay got their degrees. This season, some 1,200 students and faculty answered the call and baked. "It was the Jesuits who changed my paradigm from thinking about my own kitchen to thinking about the world," says Kiefer.
The word on Spread the Bread is spreading. Last spring it was among 10 groups nationwide recognized on National Make a Difference Day, winning $10,000 from the Paul Newman Foundation. Last Halloween, Spread the Bread hosted its first SandWitch-a-thon, a sandwich drive to benefit shelters and food banks. And Kiefer is planning a Spread the Bread Youth Philanthropy Conference this spring to teach families how they can make a difference in their communities.
"One of the things I'm most proud of," Kiefer says, "is that this initiative has taught thousands of people, young and old, that they can make a profound difference in a simple way."
BELLA ENGLISH
Darcel Hunt
In a basement room in the Farragut Elementary School on Mission Hill, Darcel Hunt pours cups of water, orange juice, soda, and lemon juice for children in the Education Sparks afterschool program one drizzly Monday. What looks like snack time is actually science time.
Hunt, 21, is a junior at Simmons College, a graduate of Boston Latin Academy, a biology and education major who dreams of teaching in a hometown high school. Simmons is one of five colleges and universities in Massachusetts named to the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
As the Corporation for National and Community Service aims to draw 5 million college students to community service by 2010, up from 3.27 million in 2005, Hunt is among 1,200 Simmons students who already participate. She's a work-study student at a school that devotes 30 percent of its work-study funds to community service, well above the federal requirement of 7 percent and goal of 20 percent.
Hunt runs the science portion of the new college-sponsored Sparks program she helped create -- planning curriculum and supervising other Simmons students -- and tutors in the Farragut's regular afterschool program. She's working with a professor to establish a program to help Boston public high school students prepare for college.
The lesson this recent afternoon concerns hypotheses and acid. Each student has four well-worn pennies and four cups of liquid and a paper towel.
"Does anyone know what chemistry is?" Hunt asks.
"Chemistry," replies 10-year-old Jamarie Bradshaw, "is when you mix different ingredients together and see what happens."
Discovering which liquid best cleans a dirty penny is the task of the day. "Hypothesis," Hunt says, "is the word of the day. You're going to guess what happens when you do this experiment."
The favored hypothesis is lemon juice. "It's sour," says 8-year-old Ghiana Guzman.
With that -- and a warning not to drink any liquids in a science experiment -- the children plunk pennies into liquids and wait.
Hunt, who grew up in the South End, traces her interest in science to the summers during high school she worked at the New England Aquarium. "When I was 14, I really wanted a summer job," she recalls. "I thought the aquarium would be fun. I walked up one day and asked for an application." Her duties included dressing as Sammy the Seal.
Hunt will be the first in her family to graduate from college. She'll stay on a fifth year for a master's degree in secondary education. Then she'll look for a job in a city school. "It's my background," she says. "I want to go where I'm really needed."
Ten minutes pass. Time to start cleaning pennies. Shamar Challenger, 8, takes a penny from the soda and polishes it. Little happens. He tries water, then orange juice. "Oh, oh," he says. "Orange juice didn't work." Finally he takes a penny from the lemon juice and polishes it. He gasps when it sparkles.
"Glorious," he says. "This is glorious."
IRENE SEGE
Rhoda Johnson-Tuckett
The Women of Color Roundtable didn't always strive to educate women of African descent about HIV/AIDS. The support group was created in 1998 as a place where women of color could talk about the challenges of working as service providers in AIDS and other fields.
"We could sit, relax, and talk about our issues and concerns that are, many times, different from the majority community," says Rhoda Johnson-Tuckett , an original member of the group.
Then in 2004, Dr. Bikash Verma , at the time an epidemiologist in the Department of Public Health's HIV/AIDS surveillance program, called Johnson-Tuckett to tell her about the high rate of HIV/AIDS among women of color. Black women account for 63 percent of the new HIV infections reported in the Boston area, and Latinas in Massachusetts are 15 times more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than white women, according to a November Boston Public Health Commission fact sheet. Verma brought Johnson-Tuckett similarly troubling statistics and asked her, "What are you going to do about it?"
Johnson-Tuckett, a manager of prevention and education at the Boston Public Health Commission's AIDS Program, turned to the membership of the WOCRT for a response. The 10 active members decided to reorganize the WOCRT to tackle the problem.
One point the group had to address was how to define their target market -- "women of African descent" -- without making anyone feel excluded. They decided, says Johnson-Tuckett, that the term constitutes "any woman who self-identifies as having African heritage and cultural background. It may include women of African heritage born in this country or immigrants from the Caribbean and West Indies. It can be women who are African or Latin American."
WOCRT now has 20 members who meet every first Wednesday of the month from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Department of Health, Boston Regional Office, 10 Malcolm X Blvd. The core group includes Johnson-Tuckett; Pamela Johnson , a program development consultant; Wanda Allen , a community program manager at the Harvard Medical School's Division of AIDS ; Cynthia Harris , a program director at the Multicultural AIDS Coalition ; and Irvienne Goldson , an education and training manager at Boston ABCD Health Services. They germinate ideas for the organization before bringing them to the larger membership for further development.
WOCRT held three events last year at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury, using prizes and food to lure prospective clients through the door. The group's National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day event in March gave them a chance to participate in the first national effort focusing on females affected by the disease. About 100 people explored forums on living with HIV/AIDS, sexuality, and spirituality; they could also sign up for free AIDS tests.
Such gatherings offer a safe place for women of color to discuss the disease.
"There are things I can say to [women of African descent] that I don't have to explain a whole lot," says Johnson-Tuckett, a native of Honduras. "We just know it. And that's what we needed: to create a place where we could just be."
VANESSA E. JONES
Jennifer R. Blackmon
It was love at first sight between Jennifer R. Blackmon and the city of Boston.
By August 1998, she had spent all of her 23 years in the South, first in Atlanta, then in Palm Harbor, Fla., then at the University of Florida in Gainesville, then in Raleigh, N.C. Blackmon was ready for a life change. On a whim, she accompanied her mother, Pat, on a business trip to the Hub. "It seemed like a fun and energetic city," she says.
She decided to bring her own energy to Boston. She left the South behind, got an apartment in Charlestown, and began work at a financial services firm. One day she saw a notice on an office bulletin board about a nonprofit organization called People Making a Difference. That sounded like her kind of mission. So, barely four months after arriving in Boston, Blackmon threw herself into the task of volunteering.
Since then she has assembled books for the blind at the National Braille Press. She has led a flower-planting project at the Lee Academy Pilot School in Dorchester. She has delivered meals to the elderly, cooked for homeless women at Rosie's Place, helped set up toys for distribution by the Salvation Army to needy families, painted signs for the Walk for Hunger, and played horseshoes with formerly homeless children at a picnic run by the Pine Street Inn. From East Boston to Roxbury , she has done what needed to be done, often assuming a leadership role.
"She's been very adventurous in undertaking a lot of different activities," says Lori Tsuruda, founder and executive director of People Making a Difference. "We got very lucky with Jen."
Blackmon, though, thinks the good fortune is on her side of the ledger. "Volunteering can be kind of selfish," she explains. "It makes you feel good."
Her residency in Boston was interrupted from 2002 to 2005, when she earned an MBA at Georgetown and worked in Ukraine as a volunteer for a development-assistance program. But when she returned to Boston in October 2005, Blackmon immediately resumed volunteering. It has helped her get to know her adopted city -- and herself.
"Some days all I care about are women's issues; some days all I care about are children's health issues," says Blackmon, 31. "Some days I just want to work outside and make the city a prettier place. There's just so many different things that you can do; there's no need to do just one."
That line of reasoning has come in handy as Blackmon has enlisted her fiancé, Robert Johnson, and her friends to also become volunteers. She is currently talking with the Hult International Business School in Cambridge, where she works as a career services associate, about making volunteer activities a regular part of the students' stay in the Boston area.
It is certain to remain a regular part of hers. She has made a long-term commitment to the city that captivated her eight years ago. Blackmon and Johnson just bought a house in Jamaica Plain, but she is clearly talking about more than a house when she says: "Boston's definitely my home now."
DON AUCOIN
Jesús Gerena
Jesús Gerena walks up to Jahlil Farmer as if he's known him forever.
"Hey, what's up, man?" Gerena asks the 18-year-old youth leader, who's sporting a new set of sparkling gold teeth.
Farmer smiles confidently and points out his gold grill and then tells Gerena, a community organizer at the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain, about his recent internship at a Roxbury health center.
A few years ago, Farmer "was a shy teenager and hardly spoke," says Gerena. "Now he's a leader in his community and making a difference."
Gerena, who lives in Jamaica Plain, is a leader in his own way. When he's not catching up with some of the task force's 375 teens, he guides them in various community projects aimed at improving their neighborhood and self-esteem.
At the nonprofit task force, Gerena is often the adult go-to-person for the group's youth-led projects He helps the kids organize the annual community holiday party, signs them up to paint murals in Jackson Square, or provides a room where they and adults could drop off guns, as they did last summer during the city's buyback program. It's all done from Gerena's one-story office on Centre Street, where a sign outside asks in English and Spanish, "What does community mean?"
Gerena can tell you. When he's not helping the teens negotiate contracts for a party DJ or giving them rides to the staging hall, he volunteers as a council member for the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council and as president of City Life/Vida Urbana, another nonprofit organization that assists tenants with landlord disputes.
"He really genuinely cares," says Ashley Cotton , 17, also of Jamaica Plain, decorating a room for the recent holiday party. "He's an adult, but he's like a kid, too."
So what does Gerena do with his free time?
"Down time?" he asks incredulously. At 32, he radiates a boyish charm with his gray hoodie. "I have no life."
If Gerena relates to these kids, it might be because he sees a little of himself in them. When he moved with his mother from their native Puerto Rico to Amherst when he was 10, Gerena found himself in a new town and speaking a new language. He says those early struggles helped him identify later with the minority youths in Jamaica Plain.
"As someone who struggled coming as an immigrant to Amherst as a Latino in a mostly all-white town, I felt I was in a position to do something to help people," says Gerena, who mentored unwed teen mothers and Spanish-speakers to get their high school diploma in Holyoke.
That experience eventually brought him to the Hyde Square Task Force, where he feels like he's giving back.
"Oftentimes, young people are overlooked and not given the attention they need," he says, after helping the youth leaders unfold tables and write up a last-minute list of items for the party.
"I feel blessed to be engulfed in a community that I'm not from, but I feel like I'm a part of and fulfilled," he adds, before returning to decorating with the teens.
JOHNNY DIAZ
Kelly Shea
Kelly Shea was leaving work one day two summers ago when a homeless man fell down in front of her, striking his head on the sidewalk. Shea, 23, is a certified emergency medical technician and rescue squad volunteer in her adopted home state, Virginia. She quickly helped stabilize the man until an ambulance arrived, but she was disturbed by how responding EMTs treated him at the scene.
"They were basically numb to his situation," recalls Shea, a lab manager at Harvard's Stem Cell Institute. Born in Lynn, she moved back to Massachusetts after graduating from the University of Virginia and is applying to medical school for next fall.
"I could understand their frustration, because homeless people can seem like burdens on the healthcare system," she continues. "But it bothered me that this was going on in Boston."
Her concern led her to the website of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, a provider of free medical care to the homeless through a network of outreach services and clinics. One clinic is based at Massachusetts General Hospital, near Shea's workplace.
Shea began volunteering at the clinic every Thursday, assisting BHCHP personnel with patient intake, distributing food vouchers, socks, and other personal items, and lending a sympathetic ear to patients' concerns, medical, and otherwise.
Many have substance-abuse and chronic-illness issues and visit the clinic for evaluation on a regular basis. On any given Thursday, Shea recognizes most patients who walk in the door, even if they've just dropped by for the hot coffee. Some have become good friends, says Shea, and she's not shy about giving them a hug when she sees them on the street.
"My goal is to establish a really good relationship and help them over time," Shea says. "I'm getting to see a side of the healthcare system many people never see."
When the clinic gets busy, patients frustrated with the wait usually let Shea know about it first. Her upbeat personality and calm demeanor make everyone's job easier, according to BHCHP staff nurse Mary Ann Kopydlowski . "We simply couldn't do this without volunteers like Kelly," Kopydlowski says.
Earlier last year, the homeless man who inspired Shea to volunteer at BHCHP visited the clinic. He didn't recognize her, says Shea, but she recognized him. A few weeks later, the man passed away, a loss Shea felt on a personal level.
"I never got to tell him how he had inspired me," she reflects. "It was tough on me for a while and took a lot of people to help me get through. Now, though, it's become a positive thing, because it reminds me this work is all about non discrimination and focusing on the needs of patients like him."
Shea plans to specialize in primary-care or emergency medicine, an outgrowth of her volunteer work with BHCHP. If she doesn't stay in the Boston area, she says she'll take the BHCHP model with her. "But" she says, "I would miss being part of this program. A lot."
JOSEPH P. KAHN 
