Minutes August 27, 2015

Warwick Rotary Club Minutes

by Sarah Channing, Secretary

Submitted 31 August 2015

 

 

OPENING: Ed McDonough, President

 

INVOCATION: Bob Ridgeway

 

SONG: “You are My Sunshine” led by Miss Carolyn Dutra

 

CHARITY BASKETS:  Randy Schatz and Diane Cloutier

 

VISITING ROTARIANS: None per Bill Palmisciano

 

GUESTS:  Amy Arruda and Aaron Guckian from The Washington Trust Company; former Rotarian Ed Tavares

 

50/50 RAFFLE: Drawn by Dennis Sleister, now amounts to $437.00. Diane Cloutier had the winning raffle ticket, but drew the five of spades.

 

HAPPY BUCKS: Announced by Joe DesRoches, who was spotted by Steve Tilley (Spotter), and John Meir (Collector)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPEAKER: Daniel Kertzner, Senior Philanthropic Advisor for Funding Partnerships, Rhode Island Foundation

 

Rhode Island Foundation gave $34 Million to 1,000 nonprofits last year. There is a sense of civic engagement at Rotary, which is in concert with The Rhode Island Foundation. We lead in three ways: by supporting nonprofits, through proactive philanthropy, and by addressing key issues. We recognize that we can’t accomplish our work alone; it requires others to join with us. Rotary embodies this so well as an organization; that sense of giving is critical if we are really going to have a place where the quality of life for everybody is where we want it to be.

 

I wanted to talk a little bit about our strategic initiatives as a foundation and those are focused on educational success, economic security, healthy lives, and inspiring philanthropy. But just as an aside before I get into that it’s great to be here, I was telling Bill (Palmisciano) while we were having lunch that when I went back to school, the way that  I supported myself while I was in school was by working at Bertucci’s right up the road at Post Road. I am quite familiar with this particular section of Warwick.

But back to our strategic initiative. Around educational success, it is really becoming more and more apparent that we’re going to move the ball forward for the state, for everybody. Education is a lynch pin for that. We’ve got to have the public schools graduating students on time and on track for college and career readiness. So how are we doing that? We want to make sure that all students in Rhode Island have access to quality programs, educators, and schools. We want to see higher levels of student achievement. We want to see reduced disparities between different groups of students, different communities, students of different socio-economic backgrounds, and we want to see students on track to succeeding after public school. We do that by investing in innovative programs, best practices, professional development of teachers, and in efforts around systems reform.

 

One of the stories I like to tell around our work in education is we’ve been a big supporter of a charter school up in Central Falls called “The Learning Community”. The Learning Community has devised a system where they really work with students in the early grades – 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd grades. As soon as young people start to fall behind in reading comprehension, other critical skills, they’ve developed a wrap-around safety system and intensive instruction for getting those young people back on track.

 

I’ve gone in to sit in some of those classrooms. And this isn’t about drilling kids on phonics or spelling – this is about getting them to engage with their learning, getting them to think, getting them to speak. It’s exciting to be in that classroom because seeing those young people engaged, is almost like right in front of your eyes, you can see the statistics about dropout rates and other statistics that we don’t want to see about educational outcomes, turning around.

 

In our work around Healthy Lives, we are really working to make sure all people in Rhode Island have access to quality, primary care.  We want to see the utilization rates of emergency rooms going down, the incidents of chronic diseases going down. We want to see an increase in preventive care happening. We want to see an expansion of the number of primary care providers in the state. We want to see widespread implementation of something called the “patient-centered medical home”, where patients are not having to bounce around from one specialist to another, with no one coordinating the care. But where your primary care physician becomes your patient-centered medical home, where the services wrap around the individual. Better quality, lower costs: important outcomes we are looking for in terms of health.

 

In terms of our work around economic security: how can we make a Rhode Island where everyone can prosper? How do we strengthen the business ecosystem in the State so that it’s easier for companies to not only get started, but to grow and sustain themselves here in Rhode Island. I think that’s something probably that a lot of you can relate to and identify with.

 

How do we strengthen the workforce development system here? For too long, the workforce development system in this State has been fragmented, and not coordinated and tied with the needs of employers. So we want to make sure that system gets strengthened, and we want to be promoting others’ perceptions of this State.

 

Some of you may be familiar with our campaign that we launched two years ago called “In Our Backyard”, to really highlight and promote the assets that are here in Rhode Island. It’s too easy for us to get down on Rhode Island. We think it’s got a lot to offer, and you can kind of consider this campaign The Foundation’s version of “Happy Bucks”. We want to acknowledge what’s good, what’s right, and we want to celebrate what we’ve got going here that’s going well.

 

One story that I’d like to tell about our investments in economic security is a program in Providence called “Year Up.” This is a phenomenal program that works with 18 to 24 year olds, young people who are not on a trajectory for success. It is about a yearlong program where these young people come in and are placed in an internship in major corporations or companies around the State. They are in on either a track of customer service or technology and are getting the hard skills to succeed but also the soft skills that are so often quoted by employers as necessary for success.

 

These young people are tracked on attendance. They can only be late so many times to the program. They are connected with a mentor who meets with them to give them advice. What happens when these young people when they come out of the program – it’s like a disconnect from where they were heading before. Their whole trajectory can be turned around from just being in this program. And young people from disadvantaged backgrounds from less well-off neighborhoods, they are on a trajectory to a good, middle-class job as a result of participating in that program. That’s one of our success stories, and one we’d like to see replicated and duplicated in other ways and in other similar veins to make sure that our workforce training programs are really putting people on a track for success.

 

Those are the three major areas where we are funding. Together, those areas we feel can move the State in important areas. But we continue to fund in children and family, recognizing that, yes, education is important, but if young people are not getting to school ready to learn, they are at a disadvantage. What can we do to make our families stronger in each of the communities of Rhode Island?

 

We continue to fund in arts and culture. We recognize that arts and culture is a vital part of quality of life. And all people should have the ability to participate in arts and cultural events that are enjoyable and meaningful to them, whatever that looks like.

 

We continue to fund around the environment. As we all saw in the storms a couple of weeks ago, more intense storms are happening and the importance of being resilient and adaptive in the face of climate change is one of the things we are looking at, at The Foundation.

 

And in addition to that we continue to fund housing; what can we do to make sure there is affordable housing in this State, and what can we do to end chronic homelessness in this State.

 

When I first started at The Foundation almost nine years ago, my first assignment was to the West Bay, and whenever I see Roberta (Merkle, Executive VP, St. Elizabeth Community), I always remind her that the first time they let me out of the office,  was to go on a site visit to Cornerstone. So I wanted to share with you a couple of success stories that we have right here in terms of our grant making in this part of Rhode Island and Warwick.

 

First of all, on the issue of housing and homelessness, we’ve been a longtime supporter of House of Hope and the incredibly important work they are doing to build their capacity over the years. I wanted to tell you about one particular grant we made to them last December to help them with the running of Harrington Hall, which is the largest emergency homeless shelter for men in this State. This was to help make sure that the guys got at least one hot meal a day.

 

We made that grant in the end of December, and I don’t have to remind anybody here what happened to the weather about a month after that. Hopefully it won’t be a bad memory that comes alive this winter. It basically snowed for a month straight, so they had to keep that shelter going 24/7, because what were you going to do? It was freezing, it was snowing, and you couldn’t put the guys out. The grant we were able to make to them really proved to be catalytic for them in getting more donations to keep the program running, and inspiring volunteers to step up to the plate. We hope that many of our investments can be catalytic in that regard.

 

We also made an investment several years ago to Kent Hospital, working with Thundermist Health Center, to start a community residency program for medical students who were coming out of medical school to be trained so that their training was not just hospital-based, but so they can be able to work in more community-based settings. I think we’re all aware that the healthcare industry seems to be changing daily, a lot of rapid changes and this was an ahead of the curve training program so medical residents could be more flexible in the settings in which they worked.

 

I could not come here and talk to the Warwick Rotary Club without mentioning the groundbreaking work of the Warwick13, which is a collaboration of nonprofit social service agencies in the State who really were ahead of the curve – ahead of their times – several years ago when they approached us, in part with the urging of the Mayor, to really look to see were there ways they could collaborate in terms of getting people connected with services, in terms of the backend costs of doing business, and they’ve been at it for a number of years. It sounds like the great name of a movie, doesn’t it? “The Warwick13”.

 

And they have been successful. One of the areas they really stand out is the ways they cross train some of their staff and the professional development opportunities they’ve offered to each other but also opened to other professionals around the state. And that forward-thinking work by social service agencies by nonprofits is really something that is critical to the health of the sector in getting the work done and moving the ball in terms of what needs to happen for this state to really, really shine.

 

I wanted to just say a little about the model of a foundation. People come to engage with The Foundation, donors who may also be supporting other nonprofits directly. I think the key thing that distinguishes The Foundation is that we are in it for the long haul. We have over 1,400 component funds at The Foundation. We are going to be 100 years old next June. And we are in the midst of planning a party for it, and a whole series of events that will happen around the State.

 

The people who have set up those funds, 75, 100 years ago, those funds are still benefiting people today. And that’s the beauty of The Foundation model. People who are setting up funds today, particularly the funds that are not restricted in any way, it gives The Foundation the ability to respond to the critical needs of the day. Who knows what the critical needs are going to be in 100 years from now? But The Foundation’s funds, because they are based in perpetuity, really have the flexibility to respond to what’s needed.

 

And, at the same time, we also have our Civic Leadership Fund, which is really designed to raise money for current needs; we’re able to address critical issues. We have a rolling series of convenings at The Foundation where we bring in nationally known experts in education, in healthcare, in economic development, to really stimulate and provoke conversation. That’s what supports some of our leadership efforts. Some of you may be aware of the Make it Happen conference we had going on three years ago for the private sector where we brought leaders together for a day and a half to really brainstorm what could we do to get Rhode Island moving in the right direction.

 

And that’s who we are. We’re in it for the long term, but we’re also here today to make critical changes. Because at the end of the day, it’s about each person we’re serving. It’s about the kid in the classroom in Central Falls. It’s about the client who may walk into any one of the social services organizations here in Warwick and about having their lives get better at the end of the day. Because at the end of the day, as Rhode Island, as Rhode Islanders, we are the sum of its parts. And each part is a critical piece of that.

 

So, really, thank you for having me here today. I always appreciate being at your meetings, I appreciate the spirit of service and community engagement that you represent at Rotary. Because if we’re going to make changes in Rhode Island, it’s this kind of spirit of engagement that is going to be necessary to make and sustain the changes. Plus, you start out your meeting with a song, so what could be better than that?  Thank you very much.