Do1Thing Blog

by Joe Perone/The Star-Ledger

Tuesday February 17, 2009, 12:06 PM

How did you spend your Valentine’s Day? Dinner and candlelight? Well, thousands of people across the country volunteered as part of Do1Thing, a New Jersey group that helps provide shelter for kids in trouble. We’ll show you a powerful video of one teen who was raped and beaten before she came to Covenant House in Newark.

Thousands of Volunteers

A second video by John Munson tells the story of a teen who has been living on the streets for months until she came to Covenant House. Listen to her struggle, and watch the transformation.

Najlah Feanny Hicks won $50,000 last year for making a difference in the lives of foster children in New Jersey.

ALDO MARTINEZ JR./SPECIAL TO THE RECORD

Najlah Feanny Hicks, the first-prize winner of the 2008 Russell Berrie Award for Making a Difference for her work with foster children, used the $50,000 to set up Do1thing.org to help homeless youth nationwide.

Now she’s using much of that money trying to make a similar difference in the lives of homeless youths across the country.

Hicks, of Clifton, won the 2008 Russell Berrie Award for Making a Difference for her work creating the Heart Gallery — which uses professional photographers to shoot portraits of children in New Jersey’s foster-care system to help them get adopted.

Now she’s put together a project called Do1Thing.org.

“It’s a nationwide effort using photographers, writers and Web designers to portray the face of teenage homelessness,” Hicks explained.

The Web site, formally launched on Valentine’s Day, links to a number of partner charities that provide service to homeless teens.

Visitors to Do1Thing can click on the links and find various ways they can help, from donating clothes and toiletries to holding bake sales to raise funds for the organizations.

“The reason I chose teenage homelessness is that there are 1.3 million homeless who are youths under the age of 21,” Hicks said.

“Homelessness is a huge topic, and people become homeless for a multitude of reasons. And there are a multitude of answers to homelessness. I thought, what if everybody did just one thing to help? A great change will come if everybody does one thing.”

The money from the Berrie Award allowed her to get the new project off the ground.

“Some of the money seeded the development of the project,” Hicks said. “Part of the money allowed me not to have to focus on other things to make a living while putting it together. Without the Berrie money, this would never have happened.”

The Berrie Awards committee is accepting nominations for this year’s winners through Feb. 27. The awards are funded by the Russell Berrie Foundation and administered by Ramapo College. Three top prizes are given — of $50,000, $35,000 and $25,000 — and 16 other finalists received $2,500 apiece.

“We’re looking for people who do things that are clearly out of the ordinary,” said Josh. S. Weston of Montclair, the former CEO of Automatic Data Processing who is co-chairman of the awards committee with Ramapo College President Peter Mercer. “Last year we gave one to a nice little old lady who’s been running a soup kitchen for 20-odd years. Another went to a 17 year-old who was with another kid who fell into a lake and he pulled him out.”

The awards come no strings attached, although Weston said that in many cases the committee knows winners will put the money back into any organizations they run. “Very few put the money in their own pocket,” he said. “We don’t ask ahead of time but, especially with the big awards, more than half the time the story comes back to us that they’ve spent it to keep doing what they were doing.”

To nominate someone for a Berrie Award, visit russellberriefoundation.org and click on the link that says “2009 Russell Berrie Making a Difference Award”.

To read the entire article online, visit The Record.

E-mail: lipman@northjersey.com

More than 100 gigs of .jpg images flowed into Do1Thing from photographers nationwide documenting homeless teens.

Did you wonder how images the photographers shot in Alaska appeared on the Do1Thing website within minutes?

Well, here’s how it worked.

Photographers shot digital images using Canon and Nikon cameras capturing the images to digital compact flash cards. They downloaded from their the images from the cards using fire wire card readers, attached to apple powerbook laptops, using fire wire card readers, pulling the images onto an external hard drive using photo mechanic software. They used fetch ftp to upload the digital images to a server that housed the images. Editors nationwide used fetch ftp software to download the images onto external hard drives.

The ingested the images with Photo Mechanic and selected the best images. They opened the images in Adobe Photoshop, resized them to 1280px at 72dpi and saved them to external hard drives. They used fetch ftp software to upload the image back to the do1thing serves. The images were then ftp’d to the flickr website where they were geotagged to the exact location they were photographed. The images were then dropped into a folder called “main site feed” that immediately fed the images, utilizing a flickr api, into the image stream on the do1thing multimedia page.

Now, back to the faces BEHIND Do1Thing – Here are two of them, Picture Editor Kelli Grant, the U.S. Director for PixPalace; a subscriber based client server solution which enables independent photography agencies to have live feeds. Kelli and many of the photographers on the project go back to her days as a picture editor at Newsweek Magazine.

Along with Kelli is MaryAnn Koopman. MaryAnn is a great photographer, picture editor and all around incredibly talented and committed colleague.

Visit their web sites, drop them a note, thank them for their hours and hours and hours and hours of work to make this all happen. It was a labor of love for them. They did their 1 Thing and continue to do another 999 things to help Do1Thing shine a light on homelessness.

More editor profiles to come. Stay tuned!!!

Have you guys been watching those awesome videos on the do1thing multimedia page?

Well, here’s the man who literally spent hundreds of hours editing video interviews and helping other photographers put their videos together. He edited images, produced videos, troubleshooted technical issues and was an all around great guy always willing to help anyone.

If you ever wondered if there’s still an old fashioned good guy out there? Well, we found one. THANK YOU Curt, Penn State and all the interns across the country.

Do1Thing co-founder Najlah Feanny Hicks watches Do1Thing videos with son Mikey, 7, and a full house of Do1Thingers  at Covenant House in Newark.  More than 500 people showed up at Covenant House to drop off donations of food and toiletries, to take tours, meet the kids and get educated about homeless teens in America.

Alex Daley-Clark, Do1Thing Director of Photography flew in from her home in Maine to direct, edit and blog from Covenant House in Newark.  Daley-Clark has spent the past three months lining up photographers in 20 different cities for today’s Do1Thing Homeless Youth campaign.  Without those photographers we wouldn’t have photos.  But without Alex we wouldn’t have had all those photographers.

Alex operates her own freelance photography business from Maine.

The cars started lining up outside Covenant House in Newark at 10 am, the lobby was so full with people that you couldn’t get through.  Girl scouts, boy scouts and moms and dads with boxes and bags full of donated goods.  All doing their 1 thing.  Hours later Newark Covenant House outreach and volunteer coordinator Janette Scrozzo surveyed the room where everything was stored.