Six who made a difference share their wishes
Mike Joyce took a look at the fancy spread of hors d'oeuvres and quipped that they must not be from Patty's
Such are those who are named Boston Neighborhood Fellows, according to the annual award's administrator, The Philanthropic Initiative Inc.: down-to-earth neighborhood types whose achievements often go unnoticed.
"They're the quiet ones," said Mayor Thomas Menino. "The effective ones. The ones who give of themselves on a daily basis." Menino attended last month's ceremony for the honorees, who will each receive $30,000 over the next three years.
Since 1990, $1.9 million has been given out, all coming from one anonymous donor who requested that the selection process be designed to steer clear of bureaucracy and politics. Fellows are nominated by anonymous "spotters." They have no idea they are being considered for the prize until they receive a surprise phone call in December.
This year's winners talked about their wishes for the future.
Nancy Jamison
ACHIEVEMENT: In 1988, founded Fair Foods, Inc., of Dorchester, which distributes more than 6 million pounds of surplus food to the poor annually.
HER WISH: "We need to have a little more gratitude if we're able, instead of feeling like we earned what we've got. I feel like I can earn it. And I should be grateful that I can. And I should give. [For example,] we have so many minimum-wage earners in the hospitals. They're surely as important as anyone else. The cleaning people in the hospitals. The cafeteria workers. Everybody in a hospital is important to that hospital's existence. And yet we have this crazy notion, 'Well I went to medical school, and I studied hard.' Well, does that mean you should be rewarded for 50 more years? Because you had the opportunity to go to medical school? Even if you earned that opportunity, you were able to do that. I mean I'm sure you had a lot more fun in college, dear, than someone who was pushing a broom there for four years. Should you be rewarded at their expense? Or should you both, maybe, take care of each other a little?"
"Don't you want to hear about the beginning of Fair Foods?" Jamison, 53, said one Saturday morning in Dorchester's Pilgrim Church, formerly a traditional Congregational church but now more of a homeless shelter.
She begins her tale with the late Rev. David Venator, the church's longtime pastor. He was standing at Uphams Corner one day in 1982 holding a sign that read: Venator for Senator.
"And he started talking to me about politics," recallrf Jamison. "And I said: 'I'm a Mennonite. I don't believe in politics. I work for God.' "
"And he said: 'Get in the church. We have work to do.' "
Jamison, 53, of Dorchester, says she grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and then became a hippie and a New York fashion designer, in that order. The Big Apple was too fast for her, she said. "I have a little bit of an illness, epilepsy." Crossing streets there became dangerous. She also said she has a "mild case" of multiple sclerosis. In the last year, there was a cancer diagnosis, too, but she said it is in remission.
One day, while working at Pilgrim Church for Habitat for Humanity, she passed a Stop & Shop distribution center on Causeway Street and saw a pile of surplus bread being dumped out back.
"So I got a truck and started getting the bread," she recalled. "I'd go get it. Bring it to the church. Give it away."
When a friend of Jamison's, a truck driver at the Chelsea Market wholesale distribution center, told her about dumping thousands of pounds of carrots, she decided to get them too.
And in 1988, she founded Fair Foods.
These days, four trucks leave Fair Foods every morning between 6 and 7, heading out to baked-goods and produce distributors, mainly at the Chelsea Market, to salvage their surpluses and drop them off at about 60 volunteer-staffed sites a year.
"There are so many things discarded in this country, dear," she says. "We need to get every single thing that's surplus and give it to the needy."
Old paint. Hotel curtains. Discontinued children's books. Wood.
Jamison said the Fellowship money came just in time -- the program had been about $30,000 in the hole when she got the phone call -- and it is all going back to the program.
"I get money in the mail," Jamison said. "Just when I need it. It's really true."
Vilma Galvez
ACHIEVEMENTS: Galvez, 45, a psychologist, came to the United States as a political refugee after fleeing her war-torn home in Guatemala in the mid-1980s. Unable to speak English, she took a job as a machine operator at a local factory. Eleven years ago, she began volunteering for the American Red Cross. After a year of volunteering and taking English classes there, Galvez was offered a staff position at the organization. She worked there as an immigration consultant -- developing programs that have assisted more than 6,000 refugees and immigrants annually -- until December, when her department was cut due to lack of funding. She's now transplanted her services to the East Boston Ecumenical Community Council. She also teaches literacy classes at a local church and at a Boston Public Health Commission residential treatment program for Latina mothers and their children in Mattapan.
HER WISH: To open her own immigration consultant office in Jamaica Plain.
"It's hard for them to come here," she says of her clients who followed her to East Boston from her former Red Cross office downtown. She says they hail from many countries including Pakistan, Somalia, India, Colombia, Brazil, Tibet, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Her second wish: "I would ask God to give me the opportunity to learn all the languages of the world," says Galvez, who is enrolled in English classes at Bunker Hill Community College.
What are some of the things native Bostonians take for granted?
"As a newcomer you don't know the rules," says Galvez. "Not only immigration laws," but even everyday laws or how to visit a health clinic, for example, she says.
Being able to vote regularly is something immigrants are often impressed by, she says.
Since Sept. 11, Galvez says the naturalization process has grown much longer for many people. "The process that would normally take six months to become a citizen, it could take a year and a half or longer [due to security checks]. That creates sometimes confusion and depression for many people. They say what happened about my process? With the election coming up, everybody wants to vote and everybody wants to be eligible to vote."
Educational access is another opportunity often taken for granted. Galvez says many children of illegal immigrants do not pursue their higher education in the United States because they would be forced to attend as international students and pay the fees that go along with that status.
"As babies, they don't ask to come here," says Galvez. "They [were brought] here by the parents. So it's not the fault of these children. They love this country like they're born here, like the American people."
Gary Zerola
ACHIEVEMENTS: Founder of ''One for the Kids," an annual fund-raiser which helps the Kids Fund of the Department of Social Services buy winter necessities and personalized holiday gifts for foster children. A criminal defense lawyer with a private practice in the North End, Zerola was placed in state custody at age 3 and went on to live in more than a dozen foster homes. At 14, he found a family who offered him a place to stay until he graduated from law school. (He was named by People magazine last year as one of the 50 most eligible US bachelors.)
HIS WISH: That the Department of Social Services ''gets appropriate funding." Zerola would like to see a pay raise for social workers. ''They're the lowest-paid state employees, but they're charged with one of the most important jobs," he said. ''They could get called in the middle of the night and have to work. A lot of the time, they pay for taxi rides for the kids and their own cellphone bills. They should be making at least $50,000 to $60,000 a year."
Zerola, 32, remembers getting a Christmas present once with someone else's name scratched out and his written in its place. Inside was a gift, he says, that obviously wasn't meant for him.
Being a foster child placed in a new home around the holidays is ''awful," says Zerola. ''Not being familiar with their traditions makes it difficult. It leaves you sort of alone with your own thoughts, and not your family."
Zerola has two brothers and four sisters, from whom he was separated much of the time growing up. ''When I became a teen and had a job, I used to always volunteer to work Christmas," he said.
In 1998, around the time he graduated from Suffolk Law School, Zerola learned that a special stipend that allowed for the purchase of holiday gifts for foster children had been cut from the state budget. He began his fund-raiser in response to that.
Each year, it raises about $10,000.
''Some people disagree with me for helping a government agency by doing something they should be mandated to do," he said. ''But sometimes there's just not enough resources. And I don't think the kids should suffer for that."
Clementina Chery
ACHIEVEMENTS: Co-founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Dorchester, named after her 15-year-old son, who was on his way to a Christmas party for Teens Against Gang Violence when he was caught in a gang crossfire and killed in 1993. The institute has developed a violence-prevention curriculum for the Boston Public Schools and has established a local support network for the families of murder victims. A former stay-at-home mom, Chery will return to Springfield College in the fall to complete her bachelor's degree in human services and criminal justice.
HER WISH: To establish a training academy for families of homicide victims. "The offender is read their Miranda rights so that they know exactly what their rights are when they go to court. If their rights were violated they walk." Currently, she says, "there is no place for [victims' families] to go for understanding the criminal justice system, advocacy, and support. Right now the training is geared toward professionals. There is nothing that formally trains the [family of the] crime victim to understand this new life that we have been thrown into. There's information that should be known from the investigation process: What we need to know, what we are not privileged of knowing. Then to go into a court system, through parole, probation, and appeals. Understanding what 'good time' is, so when you're told that the offender is being released because of good time. What is good time? As a homicide survivor, I don't have any good time."
"Louis and I would always joke," recalls Chery, 44. "I said, 'When you graduate [high school], we're gonna go to college together.' "
Chery didn't have the money to attend classes this semester, but says the Fellows grant will enable her to resume in the fall and graduate in December.
"When I look how far I've come from where I've been, I can't help but cry because I would have been in college with him."
Chery says her work at the institute may soon be over.
"Our funding ends in May," Chery says about the US Department of Education grant that has been the life blood of the institute. And her annual Mother's Walk for Peace, the institute's biggest fund-raiser, may not happen this year if she doesn't find co-sponsors.
"But I'm hopeful, I'm very hopeful that God didn't bring me this far to leave me in the middle of the ocean."
Mike Joyce
ACHIEVEMENTS: As the program director for the Colonel Daniel Marr Boys and Girls Club in Dorchester, Joyce oversees more than 150 programs that serve thousands of area kids. Joyce has worked at the club since he took his first job there in his early teens through the city's summer youth employment program.
HIS WISH: That the city's summer youth job program be safe from budget cuts. "It just makes so much sense," says Joyce, 41. "It's a huge, multi-beneficial program. It allows us to go out and serve more kids, because we have more staff. At the same time it gives the kids who are working here -- if they're given the right direction and supervision -- employment skills and life skills, something to put on their resume and money to do something constructive with."
During the summer, the old Boys and Girls Club on Deer Street and its neighboring, new youth center on Dorchester Avenue, are open a combined 76 hours a week. And Joyce is often there for 65 of them -- coaching athletic teams, reffing games, doing fund-raising, and counseling members.
"By the time I was a senior [in high school], it became such a responsibility," says the soft-spoken Joyce, 41, about his work at the club. In the beginning it was his scrappy floor hockey team that kept him there. "I became so enamored with it that I just sort of bypassed thoughts about college."
Today, he says he's trying to gear the club's programs more toward education and career development.
But Joyce says that finding a way to keep the club open until 11 on summer nights was one of the most important moves he and his staff have made. During the summer of 1990, he noticed kids began lingering after closing hours in the evening -- asking if they could stick around to play basketball while Joyce finished up his work in the office.
"At the time, the homicide rate in this area was high," says Joyce. There seemed to be such an immediate need for the kids to have a place to stay safe that staffers volunteered to chip in extra time without pay just to keep the doors open.
"You know how many it has impacted by who walks in the door," says Joyce, whose office walls are decorated with members' report cards, as well as a colorful memorial poster of a late club member who was gunned down a few years ago. Around the corner on Pleasant Street, a street memorial was erected for another club alum, 21-year-old Claudio Cardoso, who was shot to death at the end of December.
About what life in the neighborhood might be without the club, says Joyce: "Hopefully that's a statistic we'll never have to know."
Barry Bock
ACHIEVEMENTS: A former emergency room nurse, Bock began working as a clinical administrator at the Pine Street Inn in 1987. Three years later, he joined Boston Health Care for the Homeless, a program that provides health care and psychosocial services to the homeless at 83 sites statewide. He now serves as its director of clinical operations. In 1993, he helped establish the Barbara McInnis House, a 90-bed respite house for the homeless in Jamaica Plain.
HIS WISH: To open a pharmacy for the homeless in Boston. ''It's a complicated process," he says, requiring a special federal provision. Aside from that, ''I think the fantasy of all us folks [who work with the homeless] is that we'll all be unemployed," says Bock. ''I would love in 10 years to be working in a very different setting."
''It's a simple concept," Bock, 45, says about his work. ''It's what you do when you have someone who has an illness that's way too complicated to be in a shelter." He says that the recovery time for open-heart surgery, for example, has been greatly reduced at hospitals -- sometimes only requiring a hospital stay of five days.
''They would be fine to go home," says Bock. ''But going back to a shelter that is at 126 percent capacity is not going to afford them the dignity or care they need."
Most recently, he helped establish a 12-member consumer board, made up of homeless clients, that meets monthly to assess the program's services.
''They will do things like schedule their doctors' appointments around the meetings. It's so important to them." Bock says that once a man showed up so ill that he passed out.
''I sort of feel like one of the very cool things we do is we believe anything is possible," says Bock. ''Even if the odds are 99 percent against us, it doesn't ever deter us."
