Birds, Charities & Disasters!

Last Week
What an interesting talk we had last week from Dr Charmaine Uys of BirdLife South Africa and an embarrassingly poor attendance for someone who had driven from Pretoria to talk to us....just count the heads.
We all fell in love with what is possibly South Africa's rarest bird, the White-winged Flufftail that is about the size of a Mossie and appears to migrate to Ethiopia!

This Week

Our speaker is Elyjoy Ikunyua, Client Relations Manager: Business Development, Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (CAF Southern Africa)

Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa is an independent non-profit organisation that promotes and facilitates effective giving, volunteering and social investment.  CAF Southern Africa has been represented in South Africa since 1997, and in 2000 became a registered Section 21 not-for-profit and public benefit organisation.

While being a wholly South African organisation it is also a member of the international Global Alliance of the Charities Aid Foundation, headquartered in the United Kingdom (CAF UK).

CAF Southern Africa is independent of CAF UK, through CAF SA has access to CAF's skilled professionals, intellectual capital and value model. CAF UK and the other organisations within CAF International are valued and significant contributors to the operations of CAF Southern Africa.

Since 2010 CAF Southern Africa has been based at Arts on Main in the vibrant Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg CBD.  CAF Southern Africa has partnered with the Maboneng Precinct Management to facilitate community development and upliftment programmes for the communities of the surrounding areas including projects at the Mai Mai Creche (care-givers for the children of the Mai Mai Market traders - Johannesburg's oldest Traditional Market), the Curious Cave and the Little Roses Creche.

Eugene Saldanha, Founder of CAF Southern Africa

The founder was the late Eugene Saldanha.  Eugene played a key role in strengthening the South African civil society sector:  he believed in the critical role of the sector in building and maintaining constitutional democracy; he set up and led two important NGOs:  the Non-Profit Partnership and then CAF Southern Africa in 1997.  He was influential in advocating for parliamentary reforms in regard to the enabling environment for civil society organisations, and was a leader in lobbying government to fulfil its responsibility to the sector.  In particular Eugene fought for civil society sustainability through reform of ineffective government institutions such as the Lotteries and National Development Agency (NDA).

In honour of their late founder CAF Southern Africa, together with a number of Eugene Saldanha's friends, colleagues and family members established the Eugene Saldanha Memorial Fund  in 2007.  The purpose of the Fund is to recognise the leadership role played by Eugene in the sector by advancing the work and values which he prized.

Vision
Our vision is 'to make giving and social investment a part of everyday life'.  

We encourage and facilitate investment of money, in-kind resources and time, by companies, institutions and individuals.  The ultimate aim of our work is to strengthen the effectiveness of the non-profit sector.  CAF Southern Africa is committed to promoting and adding value to these contributions by encouraging cooperation, sharing innovation, and fostering leadership. 

Our programmes include advice on social investment policy & strategy, grant management and administration services, research and advocacy and the encouragement of a culture of philanthropy.  We also facilitate special focus programmes such as Mandela Day volunteering opportunities.

Mission
Our mission is to increase and enhance giving and social investment, and to stimulate the corporate sector to embrace developmental values and to support social entrepreneurs.

At CAF Southern Africa we believe that the NGO sector plays a vital developmental role by supporting positive social change in marginalised communities. Our ultimate aim is therefore to increase the amount and impact of investment in the non-profit sector.  We currently have over validated 500 NGOs on our database (we conduct formal due diligence) and work with 22 corporate clients to facilitate effective CSI engagement.

Responding to disaster comes naturally for New

York Rotarian

by Stephen Yafa
The Rotarian -- July 2013 
 

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Members of the Rotary Club of Murray, Kentucky, USA, fill a truck with relief supplies following Hurricane Sandy. Photo courtesy of the Rotary Club of Murray

As Jim Kushner sees it, there’s no choice, not for him. Others may dither when a tsunami hits Japan, an earthquake levels parts of Haiti, or a hurricane like Irene or Sandy demolishes a vast swath of homes and businesses along the U.S. northeast coast. For Kushner, past president of the Rotary Club of Inwood, Manhattan, in the borough’s northernmost neighborhood, natural disasters present no options: They demand and deserve immediate and effective action. How could anyonenot drop everything and respond? he wonders.

Trained in emergency relief, and resourceful and unimpeded by the ties that bind, Kushner is typically out the door, equipped with supplies, and on his way to a disaster area before you and I have even begun to fathom the extent of the devastation.

Within a couple of days after Hurricane Sandy tore through the Rockaway Peninsula last October, he’d rented a truck and loaded it up with 55-gallon plastic drums. He’d planned to fill them with gas but there was none to be had in the city, where power outages had rendered the pumps inoperable. No problem. Driving up to Mamaroneck in Westchester County, he called in a favor from a former state assemblyman, who got him right to the front of a long line at an open station. Kushner knew from experience that with no electricity available in the stricken areas, generators were the only way to keep hospitals and relief centers functioning. He also knew that generators need to be continually refueled, and that gas would not be easy to find.

In times of need

Making his way down flooded streets and around trees uprooted by furious wind gusts, he arrived two hours later at St. Francis de Sales Church in Belle Harbor, New York. FEMA and Red Cross workers had set up an emergency center in the area. Kushner recognized two volunteers who had also arrived to help, both of whom he’d worked with in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Like Kushner, they seemed to materialize on the spot in times of dire need, no explanations required. All three immediately began to address critical tasks, such as transferring the gas to jerrycans.

Kushner also worked with teams of local volunteers. “You learn to trust the locals. They’re the ones who own the shovels,” he says. They’d have a quick meeting each morning, then be off. Kushner also got in touch with past and present Rotary district governors and filled them in on the needs of the day. “The people from the afflicted neighborhoods were the ones who were sustaining this relief effort,” he says. “Meanwhile Rotary clubs and other groups from all over were arriving every hour, it seemed, with clothes, food, blankets, the works. All good, but the size of the operation alone could’ve overwhelmed anyone. We were lucky, though; we’d seen it before. I was on the ground after Katrina for six weeks. I think this was worse, the sheer destruction.”

Kushner’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training kicked in. So, too, did something less tangible: his instinct to stay focused and calm, no matter what. “I block out my feelings, I turn them off to do the work that needs to be done,” he says. “Otherwise it’s too much.” And afterward? “I try to keep it out of my conscious mind, but I have nightmares, every night.”

Now 64 and a Rotarian for more than 30 years, Kushner has made a practice of showing up in disaster areas and trouble zones around the world for over a decade – skirting danger, bucking bureaucracies, and shrewdly assessing priorities in his quest to provide meaningful aid. A Rotarian version of Zelig, Woody Allen’s famous “human chameleon,” Kushner has somehow gotten himself to Pakistan just after a massive earthquake, to Haiti, Japan, and Tanzania to lend a practiced hand after natural calamities, terrorist attacks, and kidnappings by pirates. When tectonic plates suddenly shift, where tsunamis gather lethal force or tropical storms morph into devastating hurricanes that target urban centers, Kushner will likely be on the scene, ready to spring into action. It helps that he is a member of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, an ex-Marine who works closely with the 82nd Airborne, and a translator fluent in French who has worked with U.S. embassy staff members in former French African colonies. He knows who to call if he needs to jump on a C-130 military cargo plane or Coast Guard cutter, but even if he didn’t, you get the feeling he’d strap himself to the wing of an osprey or grab hold of a bottleneck dolphin’s dorsal fin to hitch a ride to quake-ravaged Port-au-Prince or tsunami-flattened Ishinomaki. Whatever it takes.

That’s been Kushner’s mantra from a young age. He embodies Albert Einstein’s belief that you never fail until you stop trying. When Kushner discovered that his own community, Inwood, didn’t have a Rotary club, he started one himself and became its first president. When a man with disabilities and his wife, both HIV positive, had no place to live after their basement Rockaway apartment was flooded to the ceiling, Kushner helped them move into a small condo he owns for three months, rent free. “You do what you gotta,” he says.

Kushner received the RI Service Above Self Award, but perhaps it should be changed to Service Way Above Self. Even then it would fail to capture his compassionate compulsion to do good. “The world is such an insane place,” he says. “I can’t just sit around and watch.”

Born and raised in New York City, Kushner joined the Marines at age 18 and was assigned to Administrative Intelligence – “pencil-pushing,” as he calls it. He contracted a severe case of pneumonia at Parris Island in South Carolina. It recurred throughout his three years in the service and led to his discharge with a lifetime disability. He decided to continue his education and won a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship to study at University College in London, an opportunity that forged his bond with Rotary.

If you’re in Kushner’s company long enough, you’ll find that narrative cohesion may elude him, but a thematic unity will take shape. A moment after delving into the earlier phases of his life, Kushner leaps to a lengthy anecdote about rescuing dogs with a Zodiac boat crew in flooded New Orleans, post Katrina. Then, just as abruptly, he’s in a makeshift hospital in Pakistan. A minute later, he’s flying doctors into Haiti. He’s proved himself repeatedly as a first responder who values systemic organization and the logical deployment of resources, so you’re inclined to cut him some slack if his anecdotal thought processes don’t follow a similar path. You begin to trust that he will make landfall within reach of where he took flight.

Dropping everything to help

In time, Kushner’s reminiscences lead to a clearer understanding of his current status as a Rotarian with the will and wherewithal to drop everything and go where he’s needed. In 1991, he and two other ex-military men wrote a state law to help veterans with disabilities to work as New York street vendors; his friend Joseph Kaswan had discovered an obscure 19th-century version written to support Civil War veterans. Together they updated it and lobbied the state legislature to get the new law passed, against fierce resistance from politicians defending brick-and-mortar retailers. The process took 10 years. By then Kushner had assembled a group of disabled vets – a committee, in his words – who, along with him, sold high-end jewelry on the street for bargain-basement prices. “I made a deal with the main importer for Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, those places, to buy end-of-season overstock, stuff they have to move out, for pennies on the dollar,” he says.

This enterprise provides Kushner with a living and a flexible schedule. “We’re the only stands that make money,” he announces with pride as you stroll with him across a Midtown hotel lobby. He stops you in front of the hotel gift shop and points to a row of bracelets encrusted with semiprecious jewels in the display window. “Those, there, $50 each? We sell exactly the same ones for $5.”

Kushner’s street savvy carries over to every aspect of his volunteer work. He’s quick to offer well-meaning clubs advice based on his experiences around the world: “Before you write a check, you gotta know where that money ends up. Send somebody down there to see who’s who, what’s what, where the money’s really going. It costs a little, but it can save a lot. You want to help out an orphanage in the Dominican Republic? All well and good, but do the due diligence.”

They’re words of wisdom from a Rotarian who’s seen some donations disappear into the pockets of corrupt individuals while other contributions reach their intended recipients. The hard-won knowledge of a weathered veteran who’s battled floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornadoes with a single purpose in mind: to leave things in better shape than he found them. Right now, at this very moment, you can be sure that whatever Jim Kushner is up to, he’s also preparing for the next calamity.