Do1Thing Blog

The Newark Bears baseball team reached out to Do1Thing offering to help homeless teens in New Jersey. They did more than just reach out, they offered by homeless teens at Covenant House Newark internships with the Bears organization. Ronald and Ann Marie, both featured in the People Magazine spread on Do1Thing are two of the five teens.

Our sincere thanks to the Bears organization and Patti Webster, ceo of W&W Public Relations who put Do1Thing, Covenant House and the Bears together. The Newark Bears did more than 1 thing, they took a chance by hiring 5 homeless teens and gave them a possibility of a better life.

Will you join us in doing1thing?

Visit the Newark Bears site, tell them they did a great thing, go see one of their ball games, encourage other employers to reach out to do1thing and let’s make a difference!

BRAVO NEWARK BEARS!

There are so many problems today, it’s hard to know where to start. Even the Obama Administration is taking the kitchen sink approach – throw it all in there and see how far we can get. But the president has also called on Americans to get involved…a renewed call to roll up our sleeves and help clean this up. A group of award winning photojournalists are doing just that – picking one issue – the growing number of homeless teenagers – and doing what they can. Do1Thing founder Najlah Feanny Hicks says it’s working.

NPR award winning veteran journalist Susan Barnett, producer and host of 51% – The Women’s Perspective features Do1Thing.org.

Listen here:

51 % The Women’s Perspective

YOU THINK 1 PERSON DOING 1 THING CAN’T MAKE A DIFFERENCE? THINK AGAIN! Kirstina Woung-Fallon DID 1 THING and it turned into donations of thousands of things!

Meet Kristina Woung-Fallon, a sophomore at Mount Saint Mary Academy and a Senior Girl Scout from Girl Scouts Heart of NJ.

Kristina developed a project to bring awareness to our community of a forgotten group of young adults. Since she was in kindergarten she has served the homeless…the babies, displaced families, and the elderly but never thought about the 18-22 year old homeless youth. She decided to bring awareness to her high school & grammar school community, girl scouts & boy scouts communities, and anyone who would listen at physical therapy, at basketball games, in stores, in the neighborhood, email friends, etc…

She started in October 2008 to bring the awareness by asking local schools and business to leave her gold decorated boxes with informational flyers in their lobby as a collection site. She spoke at various meetings and met with leaders, managers, principles, store managers, classmates, etc. She sent emails asking friends to pass the need on and to “help her help them” and to just “do one thing…whatever your one thing is.”  As the awareness started to spread she needed to coordinate the dropping off and picking up of the donations …duffel bags, tote bags, backpacks, toiletries, gift items, socks, hats, gloves, scarves, school & office supplies, etc..

As the donations arrived she spent hours sorting & counting the items in boxes, bags, & bins. She kept track of what she was receiving and what she needed more of. As she saw a need for a specific item she would put a plea out for more of the needed items. Some times the same people donated again. Kristina then had to ask for help to organize and assemble the 125 duffel, tote, and backpacks.

On assembly night, family, friends, Girl Scout troop friends & moms packed each bag with essential toiletries and then the extra gifts & accessories. Kristina had an inventory sheet for each bag that she personally highlighted the item, “Hugs & Love.” Her goal was to make each youth that received a bag feel that they were loved and remembered.
Delivery on Saturday, February 14th took 3 trucks and a filled car to bring the helpers, the filled duffels, totes, & backpacks, and a boxes of extra supplies that couldn’t fit in the bags. It is a day that Kristina will ever forget…seeing the multitude of all the “do 1 thing” projects come together! After 6 months of planning, organizing, and completing Kristina’s Gold project, “Duffle of Hugs” the truly amazing part is that donations are still coming in and the project is not ending.

Just 1 More Person Doing 1 Thing Which Had 1 Huge Impace

Hat’s off to girl scout Kathleen O’Donnell_Pickert!

The Covenant House in Newark was the site of the Valentine’s Day Prom for homeless teens living at the shelter.  The Dance was thrown by a group of volunteers who solicited donations for the suits, dresses, accessories, entertainment, decorations, and food. This was a night they will remember forever.

Kathleen O’Donnell-Pickert working on her Girl Scout Gold Award pulled together an amazing group of family and friends which created memories that will last a lifetime.

Produced by Jeff Rhode for the Do1Thing Project

The Do1Thing cake donated for the Covenant House prom in Newark

If you’re wondering what all those single acts of kindness added up to on Valentine’s Day, here’s an early report from Covenant House:

In New York City approximately $20,000 was raised and you filled the clothing room with in-kind gifts.

In New Jersey you raised another $10,000, you filled half of a large room with donated goods, you filled the gym with people, threw a prom for the kids and you topped off the pantry and filled the freezer.

In Orlando you delivered new clothing, baby items, hygiene supplies, gym supplies, books and cash.

In Missouri local media coverage from St. Louis Catholic Review, KIHT and KLOU-FM spawned numerous clothing drives amongst you and you raised more cash for the local Covenant House.

In Georgia one of the highlights was a group of high school and college students from Christ Harvest Ministries, who stayed all day and played basketball with the kids. Covenant House also received numerous gift cards, clothes and school supplies from you.

In Michigan more than 100 of you showed up and donated cash along with in-kind gifts estimated at another couple of thousand dollars. The local Fox news television station helped raise awareness.

In Texas they’re still trying to add up the in-kind, monetary and gift card donations you delivered. They had terrific turn out due to coverage in the Houston Chronicle and a 3.5 minute piece on the local Fox morning show. Tours went on all day long. Importantly, many of you said you had never heard of Covenant House and came out that day because of the coverage.

In Washington D.C. coverage on the local NBC affiliate, local cable News Channel 8, and two local newspapers, the D.C. Examiner and East of the River, caused you to come out in large numbers and give in-kind donations.

Around the country Covenant House received at least $75,000 in cash donations, which is enough to keep at least two kids in a Covenant House facility for an entire year. This includes the cost of feeding them, housing them and providing them with all the medical and professional needs they might require.

Additionally, traffic at the Covenant House website was “way up” (we still don’t have exact numbers) and awareness of the youth homelessness problem was raised.

This all happened because so many of YOU did 1 thing.

If you weren’t able to Do 1 Thing on Valentine’s Day, that’s OK, there will be plenty of future opportunities.

Keep coming back to this site for more information. Or better yet, sign up for our e-mail list so you won’t miss your opportunity to do 1 thing.

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!!!