Pictured (from left to right) Rosemarie Taglione, Executive Director of NECO, Nasser J. Kazeminy, Chairman, Richard R. Buery, Jr., President and CEO of The Children’s Aid Society and Marvin Scott, Senior Correspondent, WPIX News at Ten

On February 2, The National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO) announced the first group of recipients of the 24th Annual Ellis Island Medals of Honor at The Children’s Aid Society headquarters in New York City.

This award honors those who exemplify a life dedicated to hard work, self-improvement, community service and who preserve and celebrate the history, traditions, and values of his or her ancestors.

Richard R. Buery, Jr. is one of 95 individuals who will receive this prestigious award at an Annual Gala Awards Dinner on Ellis Island on Saturday, May 8^th, 2010. He is the son of Panamanian immigrants. Much to our CEO’s delight, Michael J. Piazza, former catcher for the New York Mets, is among the recipients.

The article mentions the program’s amazing results: “40 percent to 50 percent reductions in teenage girls’ pregnancies and births” to make the point of the program’s effectiveness. The article also notes that “such instances of proven effectiveness are rare … because rigorous evaluations are still uncommon in most areas of social policy, including education.” The authors also note that “evidence-based reforms could help [federal social programs] evolve to become much more effective.”

The fact that our teen pregnancy prevention program is proven-effective helped it meet Top Tier evidence of effectiveness standards by The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy late last year. This designation means that the Children’s Aid Carrera program could potentially receive public funding for the first time in its existence; the program could thus expand greatly in coming years.

I’m proud that our program was mentioned in the Ed Week commentary as proven-effective and even more proud that the program meets Top Tier evidence of effectiveness. Certainly, there will be more news about this program to come!

Richard R. Buery, Jr.
President and Chief Executive Officer
The Children’s Aid Society

Many of us have watched with deep concern as the children in our communities have become overweight or obese seemingly overnight. The problem is national, affecting one in three children in the U.S. And according to First Lady Michelle Obama the problem is worse in African-American and Latino communities, affecting one in two children.

The First Lady’s Let’s Move initiative to tackle childhood obesity, announced on February 9, could not come at a more opportune time. Childhood obesity is known to contribute to high blood pressure in children and type 2 diabetes; these are illnesses that we used to see only in adults and that can affect children for their entire lives.

As Ms. Obama stated, it’s about how children feel, not how they look. When children eat healthfully and move more they will feel better and have more energy. Vulnerable children are constantly barraged with messages encouraging them to eat heavily processed foods. Let’s Move seeks to give parents the tools they need to help children get and stay healthy.

At The Children’s Aid Society, we are working to combat childhood obesity. Our Go!Healthy initiative educates children about wellness and the joys of healthful cooking and eating from birth through adolescence and beyond. Our health providers have even been able to measure BMI in almost 90% of their young patients – well over the national norm. (For more information about Children’s Aid’s Go!Healthy initiatives, please visit our nutrition pages.

Children’s Aid emphasizes healthful eating, relaxation techniques and movement (including yoga) for children and their parents. We introduce youth to the pleasures of preparing and enjoying “real food” that is both nutritious and delicious: an essential step toward health and well-being. We have an innovative foodservice program in which meals for children in our community centers are cooked from scratch and based on whole and fresh foods, especially fruits, vegetables and whole grains. And we advocate for policy changes that enable parents to make healthy choices in their neighborhoods.

I envision a world where affordable and healthy fruit and vegetables are as easily available to children as potato chips and soda. In our programs, we have shown parents that achieving better health for their children and themselves can be fun! As the First Lady said when she described her initiative, small changes add up, and incremental changes can start making us all feel better right now. Let’s Move!

Richard R. Buery, Jr.
President & Chief Executive Officer
The Children’s Aid Society

“Although some companies are reacting to the present crisis by hunkering down and hoping to ride out the storm, from both a business and a societal standpoint, we are taking a different approach,” writes IBM Chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano in the company’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. “We believe that the issues facing the world are too critical and far too urgent — and the opportunities to make meaningful progress on them too immediate — not to act now.” |

For this reason IBM pledged itself to:

• Aiding victims of natural disasters with its “disaster relief in a box” Web-based management system.
• Addressing food shortages by helping compute genetic data that can be used to generate stronger strains of rice.
• Using technology to improve educational opportunities for 700 schools in 22 countries.

To read the full article, link here

C. Warren Moses, Former CEO

Considering what I’ve learned in 35 years working for nonprofits, I confidently say that this can never be the case.

America will never become socialist because our advancement as a nation depends too greatly on the work of private donors (including individuals, corporations, and corporate foundations) in partnership with nonprofit organizations and the government to work together to find solutions to society’s most complex problems.

This uniquely American “social trinity” ensures that responsibility for public welfare can’t rest solely on the shoulders of the state. It hasn’t happened, isn’t happening, and won’t happen because the system we’ve developed is too effective to be tossed into the recycling bin in favor of government agencies created to do the job nonprofits do so well.

To read the full article, link here

C. Warren Moses, Former CEO

Cheryl Ching, The Teagle Foundation, Donna Heiland, The Teagle Foundation, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ph.D., Princeton University and Richard Buery, President and CEO, The Children’s Aid Society, attended the launch of the EXCEL at NYU Academy, a college preparation program that exposes youth to liberal arts and philosophical inquiry.

Diogenes, Alexander the Great, the Cynics, and the perils of world government.  These are not common discussion topics for New York City high schools students.Yet on Thursday, December 3^rd, these were the subjects of a lecture given by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Princeton to a group of 40 high school students from Children’s Aid’s EXCEL College Prep program.  Dr. Appiah was one of my professors in college, and it was a thrill to have the opportunity to welcome him to Children’s Aid!

The lecture was the kick-off event for the EXCEL in Writing, Thinking and Inquiry at NYU Academy, a brand new collaboration between The Children’s Aid Society and New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development.  The collaboration is funded by The Teagle Foundation via its College-Community Partnership grant program with additional support from The Squire Family Foundation.

EXCEL at NYU is an interdisciplinary, interactive college preparatory program based on academically rigorous training in philosophy and writing. The program will prepare CAS EXCEL high school juniors for competitive intellectual achievement, and will assist them in every phase of the college application, including the personal essay.

Richard Buery, speaks with teen members of the EXCEL at NYU Academy at the kick-off reception.

Beginning with after school and weekend sessions during the academy year, the program culminates in a 4-week Summer Seminar on the NYU campus where students will participate in lively, intensive training sessions in philosophic inquiry, critical thinking and expository writing. Dr. Appiah’s book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, will be the central text of the summer course. A technology-based logic game, created by Professor David Velleman, will also be used during the summer program. The program also features Uptown/Downtown cultural exchanges, NYU student-Bronx HS student interactions, interactive technology, cultural events, tutoring and evaluation.

If the kickoff event was any indication, the EXCEL Academy students are in for a wonderful year.  The students were very engaged by the presentation.  Dr. Appiah never spoke down to the students; instead, he challenged them with difficult language and concepts. The evening was a testament to the intellectual curiosity and unlimited potential of our young people.

Richard R. Buery, Jr.
President and Chief Executive Officer
The Children’s Aid Society

You might be invited to one of these lunches in the coming weeks, as charities make that year-end fund-raising push. The CEOs will have his (or her) spiel down pat. He’s polished. He even has a dollar figure in mind that he’d like to see you contribute. But eventually he’ll stop talking, and then it’s your turn to ask the questions. What you ask can help you determine the best use of your philanthropic dollar.

Here are the first three questions every courted donor should ask during The Lunch:

To read the full article, link here

C. Warren Moses, Former CEO

But while sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I thought about what I’m grateful for. Those people surrounding me at the table — my wonderful wife, the kids I’m so proud of, and the grandchildren who never stop making me laugh — top the list. But I am also thankful to have a job that I love.

I’ve spent most of my career working for the Children’s Aid Society, a New York City nonprofit whose sole mission is caring for the health, education and well-being of children. My first job with Children’s Aid was as a social worker; today, I am the (former) CEO…..

To read the full article, link here

C. Warren Moses, Former CEO

86 adolescents become pregnant every hour of every day

50 adolescents give birth every hour of every day

24 adolescents terminate pregnancies every hour of every day

457 adolescents contract STDs every hour of every day

Teen pregnancy and its far reaching ramifications on the teens,  the children born to these teens, and society as a whole is very much in the sights of national funding priorities.  We are pleased to report that our Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program (APPP) has just been found to meet Top Tier evidence of effectiveness standards by The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy.

This is an initiative, being reviewed by Congress, which identifies social program models that meet these criteria as a way to identify which programs should receive federal funds. The Children’s Aid Carrera program could potentially receive public funding for the first time in its existence as a result of this finding, meaning the program could expand greatly in coming years.

We truly hope this assessment will broaden the reach of our APPP program which currently has replications in New York, Baltimore, District of Columbia, Atlanta, Toledo and Flint, and reduces pregnancies by 50% in the communities served.  That’s a much better statistic to work with.

Kathy de Meij, Associate Director of Development, Director of Marketing & Special Events

It could be a newsletter containing information about new programs, or a request to contribute toward a donor-match program. Or it could simply be a profile of someone whose life was improved because of the financial support of people like you.

This is because now more than ever, nonprofits need to focus on marketing and outreach. If your own company is going through difficult financial times, your sales force is the last place you look for savings. Cutting your sales department would be mortgaging your future. The same thing applies to non profits. The last place we reduce spending is in the areas that help us add to our coffers: public relations, donor communications, and marketing.

Like most charities, The Children’s Aid Society needs to make every effort to keep our supporters up to date on our activities and impact. That means we need to……

To read the full article, link here

C. Warren Moses, Former CEO