Learning an instrument takes time – and money. When Pharez Whitted isn’t playing jazz at some of Chicago’s top venues, he’s busy changing the lives of students around the city through music.
When Pharez joined Jazz At Lincoln Center’s (JALC) Jazz for Young People tour, he’d long been a popular fixture on Chicago’s jazz scene. Through his work as bandleader and primary teaching artist for JALC in Chicago, Pharez reaches thousands children in high-need schools on the city’s south side each year, and provides free private lessons to talented young musicians who could not otherwise afford them.
Pharez aims not only to inspire a love of music in young people around the city, but to foster a love and understanding of American history and culture. “We talked about inclusion, individuality, creativity, fearlessness, freedom. Every component that makes jazz what it is, is what makes this country what it’s supposed to be.” Said Pharez to the Chicago Tribute.
Pharez is a jazz player who gives back to his community and likes to let the music do the talking.
In 1964, Virginia suffered something every mother fears. Her daughter, Pam, was born a “blue baby,” born with cyanosis. Fortunately, Virginia had access to the medical care that would save her daughter’s life.
As Mother’s Day approached, Virginia began thinking about all the mothers she knew in her life and how lucky these women – like her – were to have access to health care. How could she celebrate their good fortunes while at the same time help those mothers and babies in need?
Rather than spending money on Mother’s Day cards that would likely end up buried in a drawer, Virginia decided to donate $10 on behalf of each woman she would usually send a card to. Virginia’s thoughtful act enables Project HOPE to provide Kangaroo Mother Care wraps for moms and special health care worker training, which support the critical, lifesaving bonding between mothers and newborns immediately after birth.
To further her impact, she sent a free Project HOPE card to each woman, telling them of the donation that was made in their honor, informing them of the cause, and raising awareness for the #SaveNewbornsNow campaign.
Virginia says she has chosen to become a supporter of Project HOPE “because they can be ‘my hands and feet,’ going where I can’t go to help people that I can’t help.”
Today, Virginia is mother to three children, grandmother to twelve grandchildren and great-grandmother to six great-grandchildren. And while she may not be able to travel the world to help mothers and babies in need, she came up with her own solution.
“She worked up until the week she died,” Taylor Thompson, said of his mom, Maureen Thompson. “Her real passion was architecture. When she went to the office, she wasn’t Maureen with breast cancer, she was Maureen the architect.”
As an architecture student, Maureen Thompson, designed a Habitat for Humanity house that would forever change the lives of dozens of families – including her own.
When he was just 17, Taylor — who aspires to become an architect, too — was literally following in his mother’s footsteps. In honor of her memory, Taylor raised an astounding $85,000 to build a Habitat home — right around the corner from the one his mother designed.
Every Saturday, Taylor worked alongside the future homeowner, single-mother Annette Lopez, to build what will be a game-changing two-story home in Austin, Texas for Lopez and her four-year-old daughter, Isabella.
After Taylor finished the Austin home, he expanded his work with Habitat for Humanity, working alongside former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter to build homes in Memphis in 2016 and again in Edmonton earlier this year.
Now he’s raising money to sponsor a second Habitat home in Austin – this one to honor women who, like his mother, have battled breast cancer.
Taylor says “doing one thing, no matter how big or small, has the power to change the world” – we couldn’t agree more.
Ifeoma Egwuonwu, a Nigerian nurse, was amazed to discover she was living in the childhood home of the founder of The Atlantic Philanthropies, Charles Feeney, in New Jersey. It inspired her to read a biography written by Irish journalist, Conor O’Clery, about the philanthropist’s life and his motivation to give away the bulk of his personal fortune for the betterment of humanity.
“I read this book, I felt goosebumps,” Egwuonwu wrote in a 2016 letter to Feeney. “Like your mother, I am a registered nurse raising three children, working ‘double shifts,’ and struggling to pay the bills month to month.” She also sought to follow, in her own way, in Feeney’s footsteps.
In 2010 Egwuonwu founded a non-profit organization, Hope Alive Africa Charities (HAAC), an organization that provides health services in Nigeria. This year, Egwuonwu earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT to better serve this nonprofit organization.
To-date HAAC has treated more than 1,500 villagers with chronic and acute health issues in two villages. Incredibly this includes guaranteed ongoing medication management for 424 hypertension and diabetes patients over the next two years. Left untreated, many of these conditions are life-threatening.
Egwuonwu’s story makes one wonder whether the next inhabitant of the house she called home will continue the tradition of giving.
When Mary Caraccioli, Chief Communications Officer at Lincoln Center, asked the Lincoln Center Education team to share their Giving Hero, the decision was unanimous. At Lincoln Center, the word “giver” is nearly synonymous with Jean Taylor.
John Holyoke, the Lead Instructional Specialist at the world-renowned venue’s education division, called Jean “the unspoken leader” of LCE. “She is respected by everyone, at every level, from every angle, and with good reason.”
For decades, Jean, a teaching artist, has been generously sharing her time and talents, helping teachers and students learn more about the arts and creating a pathway to greater fulfillment for teachers and their students in their classrooms and their lives.
“Jean has given her adult life to the pursuit of fostering access to powerful experiences with the arts, both in her artistic life and in her work as a masterful teaching artist and mentor. She has rightfully earned respect and admiration of countless artists, educations, teaching artists, and program designers around the world, due to her passion, brilliance, curiosity, and tireless rigor,” said Melissa Gawlowski Pratt, Assistant Director of School Programs.
Jean’s dedication to the arts shows in her work, but her commitment to the Lincoln Center community shows in the countless lives of teaching artists and students she has brought joy, creativity, and expression to throughout her life.
Davidson and Davidchen Joseph were biking to karate practice, but tragically, only one of them would make it there alive.
As young boys growing up Harlem in the 1990s, the fraternal twins spent much of their time at the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), mostly after school. Their single mom sent the pre-teens to take karate classes, get homework help and do art projects.
One day, on the way to a karate practice, the 15-year-old boys were biking through a local park when they were confronted by several youths. It escalated quickly, a gun was drawn and Davidchen was killed.
The organization rallied around Davidson and his mom, providing both love and consistency for them, a gesture that Davidson would never forget. He continued coming to the HCZ, eventually became a junior community organizer and eventually, an AmeriCorps volunteer, working in the local public schools, where he learned of his talent for working with children.
Years later, after obtaining his bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in education, Davidson returned to the Harlem Children’s Zone and became a middle school teacher. He now spends much of his time helping children, like he once was, through their middle school years.
When Hurricane Harvey slammed Southeast Texas, Heather Harrison booked it from suburban Sienna, Texas to downtown Houston to help her fellow Texans as soon as she could.
After hearing the Houston Food Bank was in need of volunteers, Heather spent an exhausting 86 hours volunteering over 10 days.
Based on an estimate from the Houston Food Bank, Heather alone provided an incredible 5,160 meals in just 10 days.
Though the Houston Food Bank received gifts from over 40 countries and from all 50 states, Heather’s heroic effort caught the attention of the Food Bank’s Chief Development Officer, Amy Ragan, who says Heather is a true giving hero.
Heather recounted her experience on Facebook and said to her friends, “Houston we’re strong. Sienna we’re strong. Let’s keep going with that strength. Let’s do it all year round. Not just when there’s a disaster. Find where your place is, and let’s give back.”
While she’s back to her regular job, we’re pretty sure Houston Food Bank hasn’t seen the last of Heather.
When seven-year-old Ed Rappa walked with determination into the Harriman Clubhouse in 1948 and slapped down a nickel for his Boys’ Club of New York membership card, he knew he was choosing to be part of the solution to the city’s challenges, rather than joining the riff-raff causing problems.
Still, even Ed had no idea that, 60 years later, he’d be leading the charitable organization out of the country’s worst financial crisis in modern history.
There was a thin line between joining a gang and joining the Boys’ Club. “Both offered security and community and kept you busy,” Ed said, “you might end up in a very different place depending on which path you choose.” Lucky for the hundreds of thousands of boys who followed him into one of its clubhouses, Ed chose BCNY.
In 1986, Ed was asked to join the board of trustees. After 20 years as an effective and charitable board member, he was elected President, the first alumnus to hold the position. During his 10-year tenure, Ed successfully helped guide BCNY through the 2008 financial crisis. He is now Chairman of the Boy’s Club of New York.
Ed has no doubts he will always be a Boys’ Club boy, and he will continue opening doors to programs that will cultivate positive qualities in the young men of New York for years to come.
When an “encore” career leads to a second act of giving
When retiree Elissa Garr embarked on her “second” career through the website Encore.org, it was meant to be temporary. A former elementary school teacher, Elissa decided to use her skills, honed over a lifetime of teaching, to help shine a light on the issues affecting children most in need.
Elissa volunteered to be the executive director for First Star, an organization dedicated to addressing child neglect and abuse, the nation’s foster care system, and helping youth succeed in education and life.
Elissa soon became the president of First Star’s Greater Washington Academy, providing skills and education programming to ensure foster youth can succeed at high school, and eventually, college. But her work evolved into more than just a college preparatory program. Even after students embarked on their educational paths, Elissa kept in touch with students, teachers, and parents, helping to answer some of the most pressing issues these students faced.
After years of hard work and dedication to helping foster children in her area, she then turned her attention towards helping her peers. To date, Elissa has helped guide eight seniors through high school and into college. Three of them even received scholarships to four-year universities.
Elissa’s latest endeavor is the launch of First Star Institute, which builds on the organization’s effort to reform the foster system for children in Maryland.
Truly exceptional philanthropists are about as common as four-leaf clovers. So when you find a whole family full of givers, it is like stumbling across an entire field of the green good luck charms. One case is Philadelphia’s Haas family, who have quietly established themselves as a role model of how family philanthropy can work for all levels of society.
The Haas story begins, unsurprisingly, with an exceptional couple. Otto Haas came to Philadelphia from Germany in 1909 to begin expansion of his company, Rohm and Haas. The company, which started as a maker of leather tanning materials, grew to become a massive specialty chemical manufacturer, and Otto found success beyond his wildest dreams. In 1945 he used some of his wealth to start a foundation to address post-war social issues, particularly focused on helping fatherless children. This foundation eventually became the William Penn Foundation, a Philadelphia-centric institution that works on all manner of important causes, including education, conservation, and culture.
The south facade of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is shown June 9, 2003 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Stefan Zaklin/Getty Images)
Otto’s wife, Phoebe Waterman, was every bit as successful and ambitious as her husband. Awarded a doctorate in astronomy in 1913, she became one of the first American women to play a major role in the rapidly growing field of space research. Even after she left the professional world, she remained an asset to science, volunteering as a citizen with the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Her passion for the stars and her family’s endowment to the National Air & Space Museum resulted in the Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory, a fitting tribute to a pioneer of space research.
Otto and Phoebe had two boys, John and F. Otto, and they took after their parents in both brains and heart. They both took major roles in Rohm and Haas, carrying on the family legacy as well as ensuring that it was a company that promoted the advancement of women and minorities. And much like their parents, in time they were ready to step away from the business and put their efforts into philanthropy. Both served on the board of the William Penn Foundation as well as continued the giving tradition in personal ways.
Path Out of the Woods to a Meadow, Pennsylvania. (Photo by: Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The list of organizations the brothers played a part in is almost as long as the list of organizations in all of Philadelphia. John and his wife Chara founded the Stoneleigh Foundation to target the needs of vulnerable and underserved children. F. Otto focused a great deal of his energies on conservation, becoming one of the founding board members of Preservation Pennsylvania, who have since named their annual award after him. And this only scratches the surface of what the pair have achieved.
Philanthropy is a tradition that the rest of the family has carried on. The next generation founded the Wyncote Foundation to tackle social, environmental and cultural issues. What is more, nearly 40 family members share a fortune estimated to be around $3 billion, and already more than half of it is slated for charitable causes. This is not a family that brags or even seeks publicity, but the name Haas should continue to be praised from the streets of Philadelphia all the way to the stars.
