Children's Aid Society» NY Times Neediest Cases Stories

Posts Tagged ‘NY Times Neediest Cases Stories’ (Feed)

Lifting a Girl and Her Ailing Grandmother – January 15th, 2010

Maria Cruz de Leon, 10, and Rosa Cruz at home in Washington Heights. Last summer, Maria got help to improve her reading.

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund recently featured this Children’s Aid story about Maria Cruz de Leon and how Children’s Aid helped improve her reading. Below is an excerpt from the original article by Daniel Slotnik.

The speakers behind the green sofa and love seat in the sunny living room of Rosa Cruz’s Washington Heights apartment were silent as Ms. Cruz’s 10-year-old granddaughter, Maria Cruz de Leon, shyly danced.

Maria said she loved dancing and singing, but she liked dancing more because “when I’m dancing, I just feel like I’m alone and everybody’s watching me.”

She said she had learned many of her steps at Alvin Ailey Dance Camp, a Children’s Aid Society summer camp that taught her “jazz, hip-hop, a lot of things I can’t even remember.”

Ms. Cruz beamed at Maria’s footwork, her smile belying the tough times they had shared.

Climbing to Success, and Helping Others Along – December 25th, 2009

Patrick Alvarez, left, and Isaias Garcia serving up a turkey dinner last week in Harlem.

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund recently featured, by Sam Dolnick, this Children’s Aid story about Patrick Alvarez and Isaias Garcia and how they give back because of the help they have been given. Below is an excerpt from the original article.

Patrick Alvarez made sure the tables of children were eating their turkey while he directed a group of volunteers to the kitchen, nodded thanks to a mentor and shook hands with a well-wisher grateful for the meal.

The blizzard of activity might have overwhelmed most people, but Mr. Alvarez, 19, has spent his life overcoming long odds. He went from living in a homeless shelter with his mother to studying economics at Syracuse University, where he is a sophomore. Along the way, he said, he saw domestic abuse at home, mostly in the Bronx, cold nights on a shelter floor and fierce battles with Brooklyn rats.

But all of that seemed a lifetime ago on Tuesday night at the Frederick Douglass Center on the Upper West Side, as Mr. Alvarez watched some 200 people eat Thanksgiving dinners provided by a nonprofit group that he founded.

A Long and Winding Road Together – December 18th, 2009

Clockwise from upper left, Calif Green and his sons: Zaire, Ishmael, Calif Elijah and Isiah

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has recently featured this Children’s Aid story by Jennifer Mascia about Calif Green and his life in constant motion, that it until he found The Children’s Aid Society. Below is an excerpt from the original article.

The one constant in Calif Green’s 36 years has been motion.

A life that began in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, took him to North Carolina; Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; New Orleans; Atlanta; central Florida; prison; Macon, Ga.; Maryland; Key West, Fla.; a Harlem shelter; and ultimately, a three-bedroom apartment on the Rockaway peninsula so close to Kennedy Airport that, every three to five minutes, a plane will buzz the 11-story apartment building, its engines visible from the living room window.

“Throw a string up there high enough, you can take a little ride,” Mr. Green joked.

A father by the time he was 16, Mr. Green endured quite a bit before he settled into this 10th-floor apartment, including several “wild years,” a volatile marriage and the birth of six children, one of whom died in infancy. A series of breakups and reunions with his wife prompted their serial relocation, until his imprisonment for aggravated assault in 2002.

After his release he joined his wife and children in Macon, but in 2006 a construction job took him to Maryland. His daughter and sons stayed in Macon with their mother, who suffered from mental illness and would disappear for days at a time to abuse drugs, he said.

When Mr. Green’s wife was arrested for assault and put behind bars, the boys were evicted and their things thrown into the street. Empty-handed, they went to stay with their maternal grandmother in Macon. But as soon as Mr. Green earned enough money for bus fare, he sent for his sons. One by one he was reunited with Calif Elijah, now 18; Ishmael, 17; Isiah, 16; and Zaire, 14. (His daughter opted to live in North Carolina with her boyfriend and infant son.)

Opening Up a Crowded Home After a Sister’s Death – November 16th, 2009

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has recently featured this Children’s Aid story about a family opening up their crowded home after a sister’s death. Below is an excerpt from the original article.

Felicia Fields, center, and her family. Clockwise from top left, Johnathon, Jasmyn, Barron Smith, Tichina, Christopher and Justin.

The Fields household is jam-packed.

Pots and pans are stacked atop the kitchen table. The refrigerator is close to overflowing. Crates of clothes cram the living room, and there are not enough beds for the family of seven living in the tiny two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in a housing project in gritty Morrisania in the Bronx.

“It’s overcrowded,” admitted Felicia Fields, 38, the head of the family. “But we don’t stress on it as long as we have love.”

The sudden death of Ms. Fields’s sister, Carol, from septicemia in June 2008 brought two more children into a space that already included Ms. Fields’s children — Justin, 10; Jasmyn, 14; and Johnathon, 19 — and her fiancé, Barron Smith. The fathers of Tichina Fields, 17, and Christopher Fields, 8, declined to take an active parenting role after Carol Fields’s death, so Felicia Fields moved them from their apartment in Riverdale, and was eventually granted full guardianship.

“I’m just grateful to keep them together, because I couldn’t imagine a world without them,” Ms. Fields said. “I couldn’t let them go to foster care.”

Tichina, a straight-A student and a fledgling writer who became afflicted with cerebral palsy after suffering from bleeding in her brain after her premature birth, and Christopher, a train and bridge buff who has autism and attention deficit disorder, refused to eat for a while after the move. Christopher told a school counselor he wanted to go to heaven with his mother. But eventually they became enmeshed in the family fabric, wordlessly tapping away on their Game Boys alongside their cousins and swapping computer time for the completion of their chores.

In an Emergency, the Neediest Cases Fund Provides Relief – November 13th, 2009

The following is an excerpt from the November 6th issue of The New York Times:

By KARI HASKELL

Published: November 6, 2009

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund begins its 2009-2010 campaign today. The tradition of helping those who are struggling to provide for themselves and their families began 98 years ago, after Adolph S. Ochs, then the publisher of The New York Times, encountered a shabbily dressed man who was out of work and down on his luck. Their exchange inspired Mr. Ochs to begin printing profiles about the city’s worst-off citizens in The New York Times. Since then, readers have responded to the articles printed every holiday season by sending in contributions by mail and, more recently, online at nycharties.org. All told, the Fund has raised over $244 million.

Below, the seven agencies supported by the Neediest Cases Fund describe how readers’ donations bring stability to people’s lives in times of crisis.

Children’s Aid Society

A child walks to school without a coat in winter and does not want to worry his jobless mother about it. A widowed father chooses to use his reduced wages to put food on the family table, but doesn’t know where to turn when he receives a utility shut-off notice. These are family situations that come to The Children’s Aid Society on a daily basis.

Read full article…

To learn how you can make a difference, please link over to The New York Times Needist Cases Fund or contact:

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund
230 West 41st Street
Suite 1300
New York, NY 10036
(800) 381-0075

neediest