The commitments
It comes in the form of time, money, dedication, sweat and
often personal sacrifice. Always, though, the giving comes from
the heart. This year’s winners of the Oregon Philanthropy
Awards, a partnership between Oregon Business and the Oregon
chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, are an
inspiring mix of young and old, leader and student, corporation
and citizen. But they all share this: a willingness to commit,
to provide hope or relief or some small measure of comfort to a
world in need of much more of it.
Stories by Robin
Doussard
NANCY SERNA
YOUTH IN
PHILANTHROPY
Know first that she is only 17. Then that this oldest of six
children works weekends at her cousin’s restaurant, comes
home each night after school to help with housework and
siblings, and acts as full-time translator for her parents, a
homemaker and a landscaper who brought their family to Oregon
from Mexico. Remember all that to truly appreciate how
remarkable this quiet Madison High School senior from Northeast
Portland must be to find 400 hours a year to volunteer. As a
freshman, all she did was study. “I felt bored, and that
it was pointless,” says Nancy Serna. “Volunteering
really fulfills me. I grew a lot. I became responsible. It made
me capable of seeing other points of view.” Since she was
a 15-year-old sophomore, she has devoted hundreds of hours
volunteering for MEChA, a Hispanic student organization that
organizes food and clothing drives for migrant workers and day
laborers. She also mentors Latino youths at Gregory Heights
Middle School as part of the Oregon Leadership Institute; works
with her school’s chapter of the Community 101 program,
which teaches students leadership, service and philanthropy;
and helps Promotores de
Salud, which focuses on solving health issues in the
Hispanic community. “It makes me feel good, like I am
helping in some way,” Nancy says. As she nears
graduation, she hopes for a career in health care, perhaps as a
dental hygienist. Her mother, Carmen, is her inspiration.
“She has always been there for me,” says Nancy. As
she describes what makes Nancy so very special, Carmen looks
intently at her eldest and speaks at length to her in Spanish
as they sit next to one another in their kitchen. Nancy
listens, her mother’s words softly covering her. Nancy
then turns to translate, condensing a mother’s boundless
love and hope for her daughter into something a stranger could
understand: “It is because I’m interested in
education,” she says, simply, and there is no
misunderstanding.
THE STANDARD
OUTSTANDING PHILANTHROPIC
CORPORATION
Even for a company with a deep history of community service
and philanthropy, it was a big goal. As The Standard prepared
to celebrate its 100th anniversary this year, it wanted to do
it in a way that was in keeping with its founder’s
civic-minded commitment. The Portland-based insurance giant
decided to celebrate its own good fortune by creating the
Standard Charitable Foundation and launching an ambitious
year-long employee volunteer program. The Days of Caring
program set a goal of giving 10,000 hours of service from its
employees across the country, with each worker getting a paid
day to help the charity of their choice. In Oregon alone this
year, more than 35 nonprofits have benefited from Days of
Caring, including 1,000 hours volunteered to the Christie
School, almost 600 hours to Schoolhouse Supplies and almost
1,000 hours to the Oregon Food Bank. Standard established the
foundation with a $2.5 million endowment, which this year has
awarded gifts to the Dougy Center for Grieving Children and
Families in Portland and the U.S. Association of Blind
Athletes. The foundation focuses on supporting groups that help
the disabled or someone who has lost a loved one. This
generosity of time, spirit and money comes with little
self-promotion or fanfare but with a quiet announcement and
then getting down to work. In much the same way, one can
imagine, that founder Leo Samuel would have handled it himself.
LEO ADLER FOUNDATION
OUTSTANDING PHILANTHROPIC
FOUNDATION
By all accounts, the only object of Leo Adler’s
affections was Baker County. “God’s country,”
he called it. When Adler died in 1993, having been born in 1895
and living 98 long and productive bachelor years, he left
behind $20 million to his community, having no wife, child or
even pet to consider. The money was made by selling magazines
from The Dalles to Nebraska, and, before he died, the
successful businessman constantly lavished gifts on his beloved
home: an ambulance, a baseball field, donations for the museum
and the library. But the money he left behind that formed his
foundation has had a far greater impact. Since 1995, the
foundation has spent $16.5 million on thousands of college
scholarships to the area’s high school students and more
than 600 community grants that have helped such groups as St.
Elizabeth Hospital, the Salvation Army and the Baker Little
League. “The foundation’s money is probably the
most significant thing Baker County has going for it,”
says Gene Rose, Adler’s longtime friend and personal
attorney. Rose estimates the community gets about $1 million a
year. “That’s a lot of money in a county of
16,000,” Rose says in lawyerly understatement. As
recounted in The Spark and
the Light: The Leo Adler Story, Rose visited Adler in
the hospital in the last year of his life. The talk was of the
fall beauty of Baker. “This is a great town, isn’t
it?” Leo said to his friend. A rhetorical question,
certainly, from Baker’s most ardent supporter.
GARY MAFFEI
OUTSTANDING VOLUNTEER
FUND-RAISER
He walks through the resplendent new Our House in Southeast
Portland and stops to gently run his fingers over a quilt
stitched with the names of those who have died. “The
quilts don’t get filled quite as fast,” Gary Maffei
remarks with satisfaction. This memorial cloth hangs in silent
testimony in the 14-bed residential AIDS recovery facility, the
only one of its kind in the state. At last, it can be called
recovery, because for so long it was a place where those with
AIDS came to die. The 61-year-old Maffei, vice president of the
Harry A. Merlo Foundation, has worked many hours for many
groups — New Avenues for Youth, the Oregon Ballet
Theatre, Cascade AIDS Project, to name just a few — and
is a legendary fund-raiser. His effort on the 2006 Classic
Wines auction raised $2.1 million, and people still mention
with awe the $2 million raised in the Kows for Kids event five
years ago. “I am not afraid to ask people for
money,” he says, and of that you have no doubt. But it is
this place that is most special to him. For Maffei, “when
you see a human being at 70 pounds, you have to do
something.” So he did. For 15 years he has been on the
Our House board and worked for this moment: the completion of a
$5.4 million capital campaign that transformed a house once
filled with despair and pain into a home now full of light and
beauty and hope.
TILLAMOOK CHARITIES
OUTSTANDING VOLUNTEER
GROUP
Somehow, it is not quite believable that two tiny thrift shops
in two tiny coastal towns could generate enough profit to
donate almost $340,000 to local charities in the past seven
years. That so much could be made of cleaning and fixing things
that people no longer want, and turning them into things that
people will spend good money on. Then you meet the women who
help run this show — board president Louise Still and
store managers Jan Edgar and Terry Walhood — and you
believe. You believe when these women of faith tell you they
call their Hope Chest Thrift Shops in Wheeler and Rockaway
Beach “God’s shops” that there really is a
small miracle at work here. The stores are more vintage
clothing boutique than rundown thrift store (says Edgar of the
sharply pressed clothes, “Buying the steamer has made us
thousands of dollars”), and care is taken with everything
on display. When the thrift shops incorporated in 1999, there
was $1,010 in the bank and eight volunteers. Now there are 60
volunteers and each one of them has a vote on where the profits
are donated; this is no top-down organization and no volunteer
gets paid. Better to spend every single cent to help families
buy school clothes, give seniors a hot meal, provide summer
lunches for kids or to stock the North Coast Food Bank. Better
to show how true your faith is in quiet — and
well-pressed — service of those in need.
HARRY AND KAAREN DEMOREST
OUTSTANDING PHILANTHROPISTS
Harry Demorest still remembers Mr. Smith, the teacher who
taught him discipline. “He didn’t accept any
bull,” says Demorest. So it is no surprise that this
highly successful CEO of Columbia Forest Products, with his
engineering and science degrees, raised the $35 million needed
for a new home for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
(OMSI), even though he was told it couldn’t be done. That
it was too much money for just a science museum. That it should
not be built on the east
side of Portland. Demorest counts the totally awesome
science museum among the most important things he’s
accomplished in a long line of such things. He has put
considerable time into organizations that help give youths the
boost they deserve — such as Friends of the Children, the
Parry Center for Children and OMSI — and the education
they need — he has served on the OSU Foundation, the
Linfield College board of trustees and the PSU Foundation. His
high-school sweetheart and wife of 42 years, Kaaren, cheerfully
describes herself as “Harry’s support staff.”
“If I had a soapbox,” says Demorest, “it
would be to get involved.” The reward is “seeing
the smiles on the young faces.” Like the ones here,
surrounding the Demorests at Friends of the Children. Like the
ones he can see every time he goes to that cool science museum
on the east side of town.
RABBI JOSHUA
STAMPFER
THOMAS LAMB ELIOT AWARD FOR
SERVICE TO PHILANTHROPY
There are so many things that the Rabbi Emeritus for
Portland’s Congregation Neveh Shalom has helped birth
— Camp Solomon Schechter, the Oregon Holocaust Resource
Center, the Oregon Jewish Museum, the state of Israel itself
— and so many people his singular presence has inspired,
that the story of his life fills more than 500 pages in the
book To Learn and to
Teach. So let us allow that title to do the impossible
for this small space, to sum up this remarkable life of 85
years, and address the one thing Rabbi Stampfer wants to
accomplish with the time he has left: one more drop of peace
for a world in desperate thirst. “There is no difference
between an Arab child or an Israeli child or an American
child,” says this grandfather of 20. “My job is to
help people see each other as human beings. I just want to get
a few more people to feel that way.” He is working on a
national peace society for high schools, a community peace
garden, and on several interfaith efforts. He does not expect
to see peace in his lifetime, but he is devoted to building the
road to it “inch by inch.” If Joshua Stampfer could
do just that, to open one more heart closed by harm or by
hate, then, it is said in Hebrew, dayenu. That would have been
enough.
CYCLE OREGON
OUTSTANDING INNOVATIVE
PROJECT
It has become a defining event for Oregon. Cooked up almost 20
years ago as a way to boost an ailing Oregon economy and give
the state’s small towns a shot in the arm, Cycle Oregon
was conceived by Jim Beaver, an innkeeper at the Chanticleer
Inn in Ashland, and championed by Oregonian columnist Jonathan
Nicholas. In its 18 years, a total of 33,000 riders from across
the United States and other countries have participated, along
with 27,000 volunteers. Proceeds from the ride go to the Cycle
Oregon Fund, which has granted more than $500,000 to small-town
projects such as $2,500 to Mitchell to improve its community
center and $2,500 to Halfway’s library. The economic
impact is significant to each of the towns that the ride rolls
through — 190 so far. The 2,000 hungry and tired
cyclists who ride each year mean a boost to local restaurants,
merchants and hotels. That the event helps rural economies is a
good thing, but it brings something more to those who
participate. “The ride unlocks the beauty of the
land,” says Bart Eberwein, a Hoffman Construction vice
president, cycling enthusiast and longtime Cycle Oregon board
member. “This is landscape that only God could have
gotten right.” The ride beautifully weaves together the
urban and rural areas that are separated by geography and often
by other things. “It focuses on what connects us,”
says Eberwein. “The money isn’t the only thing with
lasting impact. The energy stays and grows.”
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