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Angels Among Us
These 4 New Englanders are changing lives around the world
by Carol Cambo
Their paths are different, but their vision is remarkably the same: Start small, think big. Do what you know. Follow the need to where it leads.
Annie Card, Peterborough, NH
As Annie Card served lukewarm chicken and mixed vegetables to thousands of southeast Mississippi residents battered and displaced by Hurricane Katrina, she couldn't shake the feeling that food just wasn't enough to get them back into their homes. Then she met 10-year-old Eddie.
Every day, he visited the Red Cross canteen truck where Annie worked, loaded his wagon, and returned to his neighborhood to deliver meals. One day, Annie came to see how Eddie and his family were living. What Annie saw unnerved her: Their house, stripped down to the studs, was empty except for a salvaged cot, a webbed chaise lounge, one table, and one chair.
Annie and hundreds of other Red Cross workers took up a collection to buy the family a hot-water heater. In this simple act, and in the miles of water-damaged appliances and mattresses piled up along curbs, Annie saw her answer. People needed appliances and beds. Walls could come later, but without the basics -- refrigerators, hot-water heaters, and washers and dryers -- they couldn't go home. "All people want," says Annie, "is to have clean clothes to go to work, to send their kids to school, to sit down to dinner as a family. Just the basic things we all want. It gets pretty simple once you've lost everything."
Annie, 45, a photographer, returned home to Peterborough, New Hampshire, with a collection of portraits of the people she met, their faces full of character and determination, each with a harrowing tale attached. "I was pretty sure if people outside of the devastation zone could meet the people in Mississippi and hear their stories, they would care and they would help me help them," she says. She and fellow volunteer Tammy Agard worked long hours to create a list of families in need.
In New Hampshire, Annie raised funds for Gulf Coast relief through the Monadnock Express Fund. Ten days later, she returned to Mississippi with $20,000 to buy beds and appliances. "The pickup trucks of new stuff kept coming, and the families stood in the street and wept. We restored a whole neighborhood," says Annie. "They still needed everything else, but this was a good start."
The project quickly grew, fueled by $10 and $20 donations, by bake sale and car wash proceeds, by generous gifts from Rotary and garden clubs. People wrote two and three checks each, motivated, says Annie, "by the idea that their money was going directly to the people who needed it instead of through a large organization." She and Tammy have since incorporated as a nonprofit, Mississippi Home Again. They received their first grant -- $78,000 from Mercy Corps, an international relief agency -- in April.
Annie estimates they've helped several hundred families so far. In partnership with groups such as World Vision, AmeriCorps, and Habitat for Humanity, and with the opening of a warehouse in Pascagoula, Mississippi, to store large donations of appliances, "we're helping hundreds more," she says.
Just as the severity of Katrina caught the Gulf Coast unawares, Annie never expected to still be working in Mississippi more than a year later. "It just feels right," she says of her relief work. "I feel like I'm meant to be there. It's the best, most important work I've ever done." Learn more at: mshomeagain.org
Jim Gillen, Providence, RI
It's hard to find sympathy for a heroin addict. But sympathy is just what Jim "Catfish" Gillen gives to those trying to recover -- as well as heaping helpings of love, support, and encouragement, with a little music thrown in for good measure.
On Friday afternoons, musicians drift into the CODACII Behavioral Healthcare center in Providence to jam, rehearse, and do informal group therapy with Jim. Paul, a wiry Willie Nelson look-alike, tunes a guitar while a man named Mike thumbs a red bass. David, who has played with Chubby Checker and Britney Spears, drops by. These are a few of the World-Famous CODAC All-Stars, a motley rock band composed of recovering heroin addicts and their counselors.
Throughout the year, the group plays at retirement homes, recovery festivals, and other substance-abuse clinics around the state. "I want to put a positive face on the methadone patient," says Jim, who believes the band's performances speak eloquently about recovery. "If we show just one person that there's hope, then we've done something."
From childhood, Jim learned traditional Seneca storytelling at his great aunt's knee, and he went on to spend three decades spinning Native American-inspired tales across North America and Europe, using music to bring them to life. He became a substance-abuse counselor later in life at a friend's suggestion. His worlds quickly collided when he joined the staff of CODAC four years ago. The All-Stars, an art therapy experiment in progress, was born.
David, addicted to heroin for 25 years, says playing in the band helped him stick with his recovery program when he first came to CODAC. "With treatment and recovery, everything was so new. The music made me feel welcome, safe." Now clean for three years, David says, "Playing is a way for me to give back to the community."
Jim's office, decked with Native American rugs, incense, and a stocked candy dish, is a popular hangout. Add to that the All-Stars, storytelling gigs on weekends, and a back room packed with donated sheets, clothing, and furniture awaiting new homes ( "I help get things to people who are trying to get back on their feet," he says), and his days are very long. His passion is giving people a chance. "Everyone deserves a shot," he says. Some of his patients have gone on to have counseling careers themselves, "but even someone just living a regular life is a success story." Learn more at: catfishcafe.info/
Cari Clement, Montpelier, VT
Skeins of yarn in every color of the rainbow paint Cari Clement's Vermont office from floor to ceiling, appropriate for a designer of knitting patterns. But look more closely and you'll find colorful photographs, too: In one, dozens of Rwandan women dressed in brilliant clothing and head scarves look on intently as Cari demonstrates how to use a knitting machine; in another, the women smile broadly, showing off newly spun caps and sweaters. Cari has traveled to the central African nation a half dozen times since 2003 to orchestrate the donation of hundreds of these knitting machines, which look like small high-tech looms. The women knit in order to rebuild their families and their country, one stitch at a time, in the wake of a horrible civil war.
"The women must not tell you if they are Tutsi or Hutu," says Cari, referring to the country's new laws following the genocide that left an estimated one million dead and left in shambles an already fragile agricultural economy. "But most of the women are widows, and many suffered rape and torture. And now they are knitting up a storm, and smiling."
Cari learned to knit from her mother and later earned a degree in textiles. In the early 1980s, while designing patterns for magazines, she discovered an inexpensive knitting machine. She eventually partnered with its British inventor to distribute it in the United States. During the 1990s they sold thousands of machines, and in 2003 they sold their business to industry giant Caron International. Cari signed on as director of fashion and design.
"I'd always had the thought in the back of my mind of helping start a collective," she says. Her mom once worked for the United Nations in its early days. "I grew up knowing that you need to do something for others."
Through the United Nations refugees program, Cari followed a shipment of 60 knitting machines to Rwandan refugee camps to train Congolese and Burundian women displaced by the region's ethnic conflict how to use them. The Rwandan government took note, and Cari, with a grant from the United States Agency for International Development, delivered several hundred more machines to Rwandan genocide survivors over the next three years.
Now Cari's work goes far beyond simple training on the machines. "We teach the women how to be businesswomen, how to find markets for their products, how to train others, how to design their own patterns, how to make a profit," she says. "They knit everything from soccer caps to sweaters to go with school uniforms."
Cari says the toughest part of her work has been dealing with large, slow-moving aid agencies, so patience has been key. But by doing what she knows, and following her instincts, she has given hundreds of women hope for the future in a hopelessly impoverished country. Learn more at: fiberandcraft.org
Nancy Schwoyer, West Gloucester, MA
A chocolate-colored clapboard Garrison has been a landmark in West Gloucester, Massachusetts, for more than 350 years. It has welcomed many travelers and been home to several generations of families descended from freed slaves. So when seven friends bent on creating a communal household bought it in 1981, its walls welcomed them, as did its spirit.
Twenty-five years later, the well-loved and much- changed building, now called Wellspring House, is at the heart of a multifaceted enterprise in humanity and hospitality. "We started out with a vision of social transformation, of giving respite care to people who needed it," explains executive director Nancy Schwoyer, one of the original group of seven. "Along the way, we listened to what people needed and everything grew from there."
Early on, the friends opened their home to people in need: a single woman rendered homeless by a fire; a mother and her young son with multiple sclerosis; an itinerant fairground couple. By 1983, the people crossing the threshold and sitting down to dinner were largely single-parent families, driven to homelessness by the rising cost of housing. Wellspring became one of the first family shelters in the state. "But we quickly realized that shelters are dead ends, and so we began investing in solutions," says Nancy.
The families needed "access to affordable, safe housing and education in order to get jobs that could pay the rent," says Nancy. Wellspring still provides emergency shelter but has grown to include a dozen or so programs to help guide people through a web of resources so they can lift themselves out of poverty.
"This was our first housing property," says Nancy, pulling her car alongside an apartment building a few blocks from Gloucester's waterfront. Its tidy appearance resembles that of Wellspring's 55 other housing units, the majority of which are incorporated in a community land trust to provide affordable homes for lower-income buyers. This year, Wellspring took its housing vision one step further with the opening of the first 24 units of an expected 124 apartments and condominiums. "Studio condos sell for about $150,000 -- a price now unheard of on Cape Ann," says Nancy.
A few miles away, she stops at the Wellspring Cape Ann Families center. Here, families get help and advice through parenting classes, mentorship, and support groups. Back at Wellspring headquarters, Nancy takes a visitor through the Veronese Community Education Resource Center, which offers classes and scholarships to women struggling to change their lives. A policy arm of the organization, Committee for a Just Society, tracks legislation related to affordable housing and encourages people affected by those laws to build relationships with lawmakers. "To see our women testify on the floor of the statehouse is wonderful," says Nancy.
Nancy believes Wellspring has had success for several reasons. "We started with a vision, which we've continually practiced and revised through reflection. We realized the system was broken, so instead of staying trying to fix it, we created something that worked better." Learn more at: wellspringhouse.org
The Gift Givers
Given our reputation for thrift, it was no surprise when New England's six states fared poorly on the 2005 Generosity Index published by the Catalogue for Philanthropy. New Hampshire ranked last in the nation, followed by Massachusetts (49), Rhode Island (47), Connecticut (45), Vermont (34), and Maine (30).
Two other reports issued in November 2005 argue, however, that these statistics are misleading. A study commissioned by the Boston Foundation found that the Generosity Index Methodology, which uses income tax returns to measure how much people give against how much they have, was biased against high-income states.
In addition, a study by The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University found that a) New Englanders give less annually ($918) to religious causes than the national average ($1,743) but give more ($1,190) to secular causes than the national average ($863), and b) a much higher percentage of New England residents (82 percent) donate to charity than the national average (67 percent).
These studies confirm what those of us who live here know: New Englanders are public-spirited folks who give of their wealth as well as their time and their talents.
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