Awarded Funds

By LINDA LOU
Special to The Press-Enterprise


Adam Fletcher liked the idea of giving away money as a teenager and making a difference when he applied for The Community Foundation's Youth Grantmakers Committee.

Adam was a sophomore at North High School in Riverside when he joined the pilot committee in 2009 and had only thought about philanthropy in vague terms. But after staying on the committee for a second season, Adam, 16, said he has gained perspective. He has immersed himself in learning about the needs of youth in the community and has seen nonprofits at work.

"We really see the importance of money," Adam said. "We're giving them a chance to expand their horizons. Sometimes, even if you have 100 volunteers, the only way to expand or start new programs is with money. You need that money."

Youth Grantmakers Committee members Brittney Sutton, left, a senior at Ramona High School, and Adam Fletcher, right, a junior at North High School, meet with Celia Cudiamat, The Community Foundation's vice president of grant programs. The 24-member youth committee recently selected seven nonprofits to receive a total of $15,000.
The committee's 24 students mostly live in Riverside, County but a few are from San Bernardino County.

On Tuesday, the committee will celebrate with the seven nonprofits that were chosen to receive a total of $15,000 at City Hall. The foundation has approved the choices.

The grant recipients are: Operation SafeHouse, $2,500; Olive Crest, which is dedicated to addressing child abuse, $2,500; Riverside Area Rape Crisis Center, $2,500; Oak Grove Center for Education Treatment & The Arts, $2,500; the Child Leader Project, which promotes higher education for children around the world, $2,255; Special Olympics, $2,000; and The Arc of Riverside County, which supports people with developmental disabilities, $745.

Applications with detailed project proposals and budgets were submitted by 12 nonprofits earlier this year. They were reviewed by the committee, which wanted to help teens dealing with alcohol use, drug use, sex and pregnancy, peer pressure and violence.

About two-thirds of the committee's students attend Arlington, Martin Luther King, Norte Vista, North, Ramona, and Riverside Poly high schools. Students from Woodcrest Christian, Notre Dame and Aquinas high schools are in the group, too.

It was hard to reach a consensus about the grantees, said Brittney Sutton, 18, a senior at Ramona High School in Riverside. She said students went to bat for the nonprofits they preferred, but in the end the group felt good about the choices because everyone had a chance to weigh in.

"It was a priceless experience that we accomplished together," Sutton said.

The Community Foundation was founded in 1941 by a Riverside businessman. Since then, it has expanded to serve the Inland area by managing donations, awarding grants and distributing college scholarships. Last year, it gave about $3.1 million in grants and scholarships.

The committee formed after foundation board member Stan Grube attended a national conference and saw how teenagers in Michigan were engaged in making decisions about grants that affected youth in their community. In late 2008, the foundation board approved the Youth Philanthropy Initiative, which launched the youth committee.

"The goal is to teach young people the traditions of philanthropy and giving, and addressing the needs of the community through grant making," said Celia Cudiamat, the foundation's Vice President of Grant Programs. "We want them to practice philanthropy at a young age and give as they develop into contributing members of society."

Cudiamat said the youth committee may be the only group of its kind in Riverside County. The foundation has initiated another such committee this year on a pilot basis with Reach Out, an Upland nonprofit that empowers young people. Interest in forming similar youth grantmaking groups in the High Desert is growing, Cudiamat said.

During the next year, veteran committee members such as Adam, will help write grant proposals to increase the group's funding ability beyond $15,000 a year, Cudiamat said.

Adam, a junior, said he used to be more focused on himself before joining the committee. He comes from a middle-class family, is an honors student, and participates in many school activities. Going to college and attaining a well-paying job are within his reach, he said.

But he said he didn't realize that some teens were struggling with hurdles such as problems at home until he visited Operation SafeHouse, which runs two emergency children's shelters in Riverside and Thousand Palms. He said he met a student who had been kicked out from home, and the visit made him feel inspired to give back to his community one day.

"I never thought I could change a person's life," Adam said. "But I could see that I could really make a difference, even as a high school student. We are changing people's lives through what we have given."

Sutton said she recognized someone she knew from school at the shelter.

"I never thought that someone in my daily life would be there," she said. "We got to talk to kids and it was unscripted."

Sutton said her experience has been humbling and eye opening. She will attend UCLA this fall and plans to apply for the university's Program Activities Board. The group decides how to allocate money provided by student registration fees for programs in the community and on campus.

Members of the Inland youth committee also attended a planning retreat, heard from guest speakers and developed leadership and team-building skills.

Applications for the 2010-11 Youth Grantmakers Committee are now being accepted. Applicants must be sophomores or juniors during the 2010-11 school year and be able to meet once a month, September through June. For more information, call Cudiamat at 951-684-4194

“From Ignorance to Advocacy - I Am Going to Change My World!”

NineZero Advocate Highlight:

Barbara Fowler - “From Ignorance to Advocacy - I Am Going to Change My World!”


For most of my life I was totally ignorant of the abnormal neurological development caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) were not even a blip on my radar. My husband, Jim, and I became foster parents in September of 1995. Over the next 10 years, we fostered around 90 children. It was through these children I learned that the parenting techniques we were being taught in trainings and counseling sessions as special placement program (SPP) foster parents, not only did not improve the behaviors of some of our foster children, but actually caused them to act out more.

It was somewhere in about the 6th or 7th year of fostering, while working in my kitchen I had an experience that I can only describe as “a revelation.” My adult son was on the computer in the family room which was open to the kitchen, when I heard “Look up fetal alcohol facial features.” The words were so clear that I looked around to see who was speaking to me, but there was no one there. I had never even heard of fetal alcohol syndrome and had no idea what I was talking about when I said to my son, “When you finish what you’re doing, look up ‘fetal alcohol facial features.’”

Though I was clueless as to what this was all about, nothing could have prepared me for what I would experience next. A few minutes later, my son said, “Mom, come here. Look at this.” I walked over and looked at the computer screen. The background was shaded from a bright turquoise down to a dark navy blue. In the middle was a face that looked like a police composite image of a young boy. Strange new words and phrases like short palpebral fissures, indistinct philtrum, epicanthal folds, minor ear anomalies and micrognathia surrounded the face. Lines connected the words to specific parts of the face. But it wasn’t the words that grabbed my attention. It was the face… a face so like my young daughter that when she saw it, she jumped up and down shouting, “It’s me. It’s me.”

I asked my son if he could remove the words and lines and add my daughter’s hair style to the image. About 20 minutes later, he called me over again. There on the screen was my happy-go-lucky, never-met-a-stranger, sometimes explosive, sleep-disturbed child who often prowled the halls at night pillaging small treasures from her Fowler siblings’ rooms. It was my beautiful little curly-haired pixie-faced angel who had been driven from two different Head Start programs because she could not understand or honor personal space so was constantly in-her-sister’s-space, and because of her all-too-often inappropriate or aggressive behaviors. This was the face that sparked the fire that drove me to educate myself and my world about fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), the devastating developmental damage caused by prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE).

As I researched, studied, and learned about PAE, the pieces of the puzzling behaviors and learning disabilities of some of our foster children began to make sense. The fact that my husband and I were often called to the school to pick up one of our children because of their behavioral problems was more understandable now. And, though we are no longer fostering, I am doing everything I in my power to change the world for these children and adults who live each day with the sensitivities and disabilities caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol.
I educate and help the foster, adoptive, and biological families who are raising them. I educate my world to prevent babies from being damaged by prenatal alcohol exposure. I work to increase understanding of these innocent, and often misunderstood, individuals. I help people understand that environmental changes can make life less stressful for PAE individuals. I teach parents that if a child cannot connect cause and effect, they cannot connect contrived consequences with the behaviors that are being “consequenced.” I teach that unconditional love, gentle understanding, and a calm and caring demeanor will go a long way in developing the trusting relationship that will help them behave in the way they want them to behave.

I have gone back to school at California State University, Bakersfield and earned a BA in Psychology as well as Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies. I have completed everything but my thesis in the Master of Social Work Program and I am wrapping up an individual study in the Public Policy Administration Department, my final class in the Nonprofit Management Certificate program. I plan to complete my MSW soon.

During the last five years I have also graduated from the Network for Children’s Leadership Development Training Program and The Arc of California’s Partners in Policymaking Advocacy Training Program. With the help of Dr. John Diggs, a Developmental Pediatrician and President of the Kern County Medical Society, we brought the Director of the San Diego State University Center for Behavioral Teratology, and international researcher, Dr. Ed Riley, to Kern County to present a training for doctors and othes on FASD. The next year as co-chair of the Kern County FASD Awareness Committee, we brought Teresa Kellerman to Bakersfield to conduct another FASD seminar that included a panel discussion with Teresa and her FAS-diagnosed son John, and Eva Carner and her PAE son Ricki. This event reached more than 160 people, almost four times the number who had attended our previous year’s seminar. These trainings were accomplished with the help and cooperation of many, including as well as Kern County Public Health Department, and Kern County Medical Center, Kern County Superintendent of Schools, Kern Regional Center, Bakersfield ARC (BARC), First5 Kern, HEARTS Connection, and many others.

BARC and First5Kern also funded a billboard campaign with Arc of Riverside County NineZero Project providing expertise, advice, support, encouragement, and the artwork for the billboards as well as posters and training for committee members on NineZero’s "FASTRAC," their FASD teen education program. I offer FASD trainings to anyone who will listen and have presented for parents and public health nurses, KC Network for Children, foster family agencies’ staff and foster parents, and Community Action Partnership of Kern. Along with KC FASD Committee Co-Chair Lorena Diaz, I have gotten up before the crack of dawn to do sunrise TV interviews and conducted lunchtime presentations at various Kiwanis Clubs. We have been reaching as many people as we can with the “Nine months, Zero alcohol” message of NineZero.

As my project for a grantwriting class, I worked with Jim Stream and Mark Cloud of the Arc of Riverside County and wrote a grant that, hopefully, will fund the NineZero project. It has been an honor to get to know and work with the director and staff of this wonderful organization that has accomplished so much in educating the world about prenatal alcohol exposure and changing outcomes for those who have been affected.

Grads

YEAH to all our seniors throughout the state that are graduating, we are so proud of you. Continue to spread the word - "NineZero".

Website

Keep updated on our newly updated site - http://www.ninezero.org/

Grant Successes!

Thank you The Community Foundation for a grant to support our services!!!

Thank you Kaiser for a grant to support our services!

Dear Sanrio:

Dear Sanrio Corporation:
From: The Arc of California


We, The Arc of California, are part of the nations oldest and largest association for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. We are writing to express our concern regarding your new product, Hello Kitty wine, and the marketing of such a product to an impressionable audience. We are concerned that promoting alcoholic beverages through an icon that has historically been marketed to children will glamorize drinking. The slogan used to introduce this product, Hello Kitty is All Grown Up, equates growing up with drinking. We believe this is a dangerous message you are sending to impressionable children, preteens, teens and young women. Additionally pairing the wine with charms and jewelry serves only to reinforce product promotion to an inappropriate target audience.

There is little difference between Hello Kitty “selling” wine and the historical case of Joe Camel “selling” cigarettes. The Federal Trade Commission charged that RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company promoted an addictive and dangerous product through a campaign that was attractive to those too young to purchase cigarettes legally. The FTC went further stating that the campaign promotes a product that causes serious injury, addiction and death (FTC May 28, 1997 Press Release). Given that the target audience for Hello Kitty is and has historically been young girls the connection can easily be made that this campaign, although not intended for young girls, will influence them directly.

We believe that promoting this product has the potential to increase adverse developmental outcomes for the young girls that are part of the Hello Kitty following. We strongly disagree with any product promotion that uses juvenile characters to promote adult products that are harmful to youth. Intended or not, the Hello Kitty wine promotes underage drinking by the very nature of the character branding and historic relationship with it’s consumers. We are saddened to see Hello Kitty promoting a product that ultimately has the potential to result in adverse outcomes for youth.



Send your letter to:

Sanrio, Inc.
570 Eccles Avenue
South San Francisco, CA 94080

Folic Acid

A new animal study has found that high levels of the B-vitamin folate (folic acid) prevented heart birth defects induced by alcohol exposure in early pregnancy, a condition known as fetal alcohol syndrome......

"Congenital heart defects can occur in the developing embryo at a time when women typically do not even know they are pregnant - 16 to 18 days following conception. They may have been drinking alcohol or using prescription drugs without realizing this could be affecting embryonic development," Dr. Linask said.

Read more here.


From NineZero's guru: One of the reasons we suspect that folate supplements help prevent neural tube defects like spina bifida. Since alcohol use depletes folic acid and alcohol exposure is associated with an increased risk of neural tube defects.