The effects of the incident that occurred at the finish line of the Boston Marathon two weeks ago will undoubtedly continue to be felt by Bostonian’s for years to come. Some of us were more directly impacted than others, but most of us have a connection to someone who’s life will never be the same.

We are deeply moved by the response from our communities, the rally cry of “Boston Strong” brings a smile to my face and a palpable sensation of pride, which makes me stand a bit straighter every time I hear it.

Like many others, I am proud to call Boston my home, and proud of the reaction of so many who have begun to put our city back together. Many organizations have heeded the call to help our neighbors. OpenTable is one such company that is doing something to help relieve the financial strain that so many area restaurants felt due to the lockdown of our neighborhoods.

OpenTable is a reservation management system used by hundreds of local restaurants. Restaurants utilizing OpenTable pay a fee for each diner reserving a seat using their website. OpenTable has set up a LINK through their site which, when used to reserve at any local restaurant in their system, will automatically waive the fee to the restaurant.

We are extremely grateful to our friends at OpenTable for acknowledging the strain put on the local economy – and, specifically in this case, the restaurant industry – and for doing what they can to aid us, their neighbors.

So if you are planning on dining out in the Boston area from now through May 15th, please consider making your reservations through the OpenTable “Dine Out for Boston” link wherever you choose to eat. The restaurant will certainly appreciate the assistance YOU are giving them.

Categories: News, Philanthropy

Tagged: Boston, Boston Marathon, charity, civic engagement

Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation

Bob Perry

Posted on April 27, 2013

We begin our quarterly giving cycle with a local, Waltham nonprofit to which we donate 3% of our monthly sales. We commit our spring quarter to Improving Education. Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation is a great local nonprofit doing creative and valuable work to ensure Waltham public school educational excellence – helping students and teachers both.

Founded in 2007, WEBF has raised over $85,000, enabling them to fund 30 grants thus far that have impacted students in all grades in the Waltham Public Schools. WEBF is an volunteer-based, private nonprofit organization funded by citizens, businesses and other organizations. Their two primary programs are the Education in Education Grant Program [EEGP] and the Sally Elizabeth Peters Enrichment Program [SEP Grant]. It is the hard work of WEBF’s Board of Directors that recruits and coordinates the talents and efforts of Waltham’s business community, parents, teachers, and staff that created and maintains a critical, progressive educational supplement to the local Public School system.

The cornerstone of the Foundation’s work to, the EEGP provides small grants of up to $1,000 for projects that typically benefit a single classroom, and major grants from $1,000-$5,000 which benefit a larger group of students.

Key WEBF supporters from the Waltham Community

A key feature of the EEGP – the one that makes the Foundation’s work so special my viewpoint – is that the program is open to Waltham Public School teachers, staff, administrators, and parents. This encourages all major stakeholders and influencers to explore opportunities beyond the standard school curricula to follow their curiosities and enhance their learning.

SEP Grants can be for up to $5,000, and are open to teachers and to junior and senior high school students, and awarded to proposals focusing on the art, drama, theater, and science. The SEP grant committee favors projects that are especially innovative, and that require collaboration among faculty, schools, and students in order for the project to succeed. The SEP Grant program was made possible by a personal donation from the parents of Sally Elizabeth Peters, a Scottish native who emigrated to the United States and was educated in Waltham’s Public Schools.

Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation Apple Award

We’re grateful to be recipients of Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation’s Apple Award for our ongoing support.

Long-term benefits of WEBF funding includes the aquisition of digital SLR cameras for digital art classes, iPads to assist with 21st Century learning initiatives, Pasco Probes and sensors for Waltham High School Biology and Chemistry classes, IPEVO Point 2 document cameras to help teach Math and Science at both of Waltham’s Middle Schools, and many new curriculum programs that have been introduced throughout the City’s Elementary Schools. – But wait, there’s more: After-school programs for elementary band and chorus, and an Actors in Classroom program at Waltham High. – None of this would be happening without the existence and hard work of the Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation.

This summer, the WEBF is throwing its support behind “Waltham Reads” – a community reading experience to be shared by Waltham High School Student and Faculty. WEBF’s participation is enabling Waltham High to purchase all the books for the project and to fund a special guest speaker to pull everyone together.

I can say, from experience, that WEBF’s major fundraiser – their “Educate Your Palate” food and wine event held each year at the Robert Treat Paine Estate – is an inspiring community gathering. It pulls together a great cross-section of the Waltham community who care about educating our youth well. Bringing together WEBF Board members and volunteers, as well as City government, business, and nonprofit leaders to enjoy a great buffet meal prepared by Waltham High School culinary students. From my professional perspective, I think those young cooks do an excellent job! – It’s important to celebrate achievements, to recognize jobs well done. WEBF’s gala does a great job helping people know how much their time, effort, and money is appreciated.

It takes a City – all of us contributing where we can – to raise our children to have the best chance of living healthy, satisfying, useful live. Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation is certainly doing its part to supercharge the work of Waltham’s Public Schools. It’s a great pleasure to give them our support each April!

Categories: Beneficiaries, News, Philanthropy

Tagged: Benefit, education, philanthropy, waltham

Horizons for Homeless Children

Bob Perry

Posted on March 27, 2013

If you’re like me, your awareness of homelessness is maintained by occasional media reportages and random personal encounters with homeless adults as you wend your way through your day. If you’re like me, your level of engagement with homelessness doesn’t reach a great deal farther than developing a basic understanding that there ARE homeless people – maybe a lot of them. And, like me, you don’t really know any personally, nor do you really know how they become homeless.

And if you’re like me, you are probably unaware just how many of our homeless are children. Well, if you read on just a little bit farther, you will:

More than 1.6 MILLION American children experience homelessness each year
Translation: One in 45 US children is homeless each year
Homeless children represent 22% of the entire homeless population

Those numbers are astounding to me. Now, here are some of what that costs in human terms, not financial terms:

Homeless children are 4x more likely to have developmental delays than housed children
Homeless children are 2x as likely to have learning disabilities
Homeless children have 3x the rate of emotional and behavioral problems as other children
Homeless children are 8x more likely to be asked to repeat a grade

[Thank you to our March Beneficiary, Horizons for Homeless Children for that summary data.]

When I think of homelessness, I think of homeless adults, and I think of the now. But, with insight like that I realize now that homelessness today has a lot of implications for tomorrow, because – to paraphrase a well-known saying – those homeless children are our future.

Here’s another statistic for you: Every dollar we spend now on early education for children saves approximately $10 later – dollars that may be spent on things like special education, welfare, or other services.

This is why Horizons for Homeless Children commits much more of its annual budget to its Community Children’s Centers [which they also refer to as their early education centers] than to the rest of their programs combined. This is what they say about these remarkable facilities and their value-added to our communities:

“By supporting social-emotional, physical, and cognitive development of homeless children, engaging families in their children’s education, and delivering high-quality teaching and family engagement, our early education centers ensure that homeless children participating in our programs are ready to succeed in school and their parents are ready to support that success.

“Our three early education centers serve 175 children each day and are designed to meet the unique needs of homeless children. Each center takes an individualized, developmental approach, providing children with quality early care and a creative curriculum most likely to help them enter school with the skills that they need to be successful socially and academically. As parental engagement is key to a child’s success, families receive additional support services such as parenting classes and connections to community services, educational opportunities, workforce training, and financial literacy classes.”

One thing I particularly like about Horizons for Homeless Children – partly, I’ll admit, because their approach reflects my own belief that there are no simple solutions and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise – is that they embrace the complexity of the problem. Accordingly, they’re engaged in a blended approach to helping solve the problem of childhood homelessness. They run the following programs in addition to their Community Children’s Centers:

They go to where the homeless are and help them there, with Playspaces: They “build educational spaces in shelters and stock them with books, toys, and art supplies. Playspaces are staffed by more than 1,500 trained volunteers, called Playspace Activity Leaders [PALs] who commit two hours weekly for at least six months. While PALs play with the children, parents can participate in activities such as parenting groups, budgeting classes, or job searches.” – Their PAL program is one of the largest volunteer programs in Massachusetts!
They realize that followup is key to protecting an investment in a child’s and family’s future, and they do that through their Family Partnership Program: “Our Family Partnership Program suports children and families after they leave our early education centers. Through home visits, our family advocates help families access early education programs and other services within their new community. By enabling access to resources, our family advocates accompany our families on their journey and help ensure they continue to succeed.
They understand that much of their daily work is treating symptoms with broader causes, and so they are actively engaged in Advocacy and trying to influence Policymaking at the highest levels: “We are part of a national movement to improve access to high-quality early education for homeless children who are at the greatest risk for learning and developmental delays. We also focus on the importance of access to childcare, stable housing, and cross-agency coordination of services, Through our advocacy efforts, we hope to create a better understanding and recognition of the needs of young homeless children throughout the Commonwealth, and throughout the nation.”

We do too!

“Since 1988, Horizons for Homeless Children is the only organization in Massachusetts focused exclusively on the needs of young homeless children and their families.”

We at The Elephant Walk in Waltham are proud that they’re our March Beneficiary. We thank all our guests for their patronage each March, helping us contribute to their vitally important work.

If you’d like to do more to help them, I encourage you to donate directly, to volunteer, or to take action by assisting in their advocacy work.

It matters to me that we give well, that we support effective efforts to deal with this most poignant of social challenges: Childhood Homelessness. I’ve grabbed from their website this chart which does a great job summarizing the impact of the work being done by Horizons for Homeless Children, an organization that is pursuing an approach I think is working:

Categories: Beneficiaries, Philanthropy

Tagged: charity, fighting homelessness, philanthropy

Integrating food service with social justice

Bob Perry

Posted on March 12, 2013

We’re flattered and delighted to be included among this group doing amazing and inspiring things with their food service businesses. Check out “Café of the Second Chance” by Paul Hughes on the website “Toque.”

Categories: Business, News, Social Enterprise

Tagged: charity, civic engagement, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social innovation

Presenting data – it’s a process!

Bob Perry

Posted on March 5, 2013

I’m well aware that for us to succeed long term as a Benefit Restaurant^®, we must be transparent in terms of how and where we direct our philanthropy. All our stakeholders must be able to trust us. To that end, transparency in this case boils down to sharing the raw data and statistics on how we determine how much we give, when we give it, and of course, to whom.

I’m an admirer of well-crafted infographics, because sometimes pictures ARE worth a thousand words. The Scoreboard page at benefitrestaurants.org is one such page that’s been sterile since I built it. I’ve started working on changing that.

This morning I came across the website infogr.am which is a free online tool for creating pretty cool infographics! And so I created one that would show how our giving has been proportioned by year since 2009 when we first became a Benefit Restaurant^®.

The trouble is, this website is hosted on WordPress.com. They are fairly strict about what it will NOT allow in terms of computer code to be embedded into a WordPress.com webpage. So… I poked around for another path to my goal of sharing our data graphically.

It’s far less sexy than dynamic infographics, but I’ve decided to go with sharing charts I create in Google Spreadsheets – as a business we’ve use Google Apps for our email and document sharing for years now – as images, which WordPress.com is fine with embedding in webpages. And the most important thing is that the information gets to the people!

So… here you are, our first infographics: How, as a Benefit Restaurant^®, our giving has been proportioned by year:

We became a Benefit Restaurant^®in September 2009, so the first graphic above is about as bare bones as they get. Once we were really rolling in 2010, we learned some quick lessons about what was really engaging our guests and nonprofit beneficiaries. Those lessons drove us to, later that year, redirect a portion of our giving. Early on we transitioned from we ourselves selecting Crisis Beneficiaries to instead giving our guests the opportunity to host Monday Benefit Dinners at the restaurant for causes THEY championed. In 2011, that transition was complete. We also still do a couple of special events a year that result in cash donations, but our focus is now sharply on our Monthly and Monday Benefit Dinner Beneficiaries.

More infographics to come in the near future! – And, if you have any requests or suggestions, please email me: bob at elephantwalk dot com.

Categories: Beneficiaries, News, Philanthropy, Uncategorized

Tagged: charity, philanthropy, waltham

Impact and Outcomes and Pine Street Inn

Bob Perry

Posted on February 26, 2013

This is the first of a series of posts I will be writing about our monthly beneficiaries – one each month for the next year. Although, today included, you have only three more days to dine with us and support Pine Street Inn in 2013, I’m excited by my recently refreshed and deepened awareness of the value of their work and I didn’t want to wait a year to share what I’ve learned!

In my post last Saturday about how I first went about choosing our monthly beneficiaries I copped to winging it, more or less. Well, in the 3½ years that have passed since we became a Benefit Restaurant^® I have become more concerned with validating our chosen targets – like any philanthropist, proving our money is being put to good use – and I’ve deepened my awareness of how we can do that. Often this involves boring into raw numbers provided on websites or in annual reports, then seeking regional and national statistical snapshot and trends data for benchmarking purposes, hoping for meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons.

Pine Street Inn, however, does all the work for me. Check out their “By the Numbers” card on the right. If you want a quick snapshot of who they serve, and how much they serve them, well, there you go. But embedded in those numbers is a RATIO that is the most interesting and, I think, important statistic of all, which is 780:730. More on that later.

Homelessness is a pox on all our houses. It undermines our economy, it challenges our ethics, it breaks our hearts. What “works to house chronically homeless people and veterans with disabilities” says the National Alliance to End Homelessness in their lengthy report The State of Homelessness in America 2012, is “permanent supportive housing.” Pine Street Inn gets this. – From their most recent annual report: “For more than 25 years Pine Street Inn has offered permanent housing with on-site support staff for homeless men and women. Staff connect individuals with community resources including healthcare, counseling and job training, helping them to maintain stability and prevent a return to homelessness.”

We need more solutions like Pine Street Inn’s. Again, from their most recent annual report: “Strategies to get men and women off the streets, out of shelter and into supportive, permanent housing have led to a 30% decrease in individual homelessness in Boston over the past five years… [Their] housing program has a retention rate of close to 90% – even for those who had been homeless for many years.”

Of course we need to know: Is such an approach to addressing and ending homelessness cost effective? Once again, from their annual report: “There will continue to be a need for emergency shelter, but housing not only offers a better quality of life, it also saves close to $10,000 per person per year in emergency room visits and hospital stays, public safety and other costs.”

Oversimplifying things on purpose here, I think of emergency shelters as a cross between the ER and hospice, addressing both acute crises and providing palliative care for cases not trending toward a cure. In contrast, a long-term housing initiative with a support system to help contain costs and provide structure and direction is more like a neighborhood health clinic, helping vulnerable individuals and families to gradually and methodically work themselves out of crises and into stable and sustainable residential, healthcare, nutritional, and economic circumstances.

As it says in the graphic on the left: Their strategies are DECREASING INDIVIDUAL HOMELESSNESS. Already their housing tenants outnumber their shelter guests by 780 to 730. Over the next few years they’re working toward a 70:30 housing to shelter bed ratio. Yup, Pine Street Inn’s approach is systematically helping treat the cause and not just the symptoms. And most profoundly, it’s restoring human dignity for a great many people.

Pine Street Inn is making real positive impact in peoples’ lives; they’re achieving the outcomes they’re managing toward. I’m convinced that they are indeed making great use of our funding. We at The Elephant Walk in Waltham are very proud and enthusiastic supporters of Pine Street Inn. Thank you for dining with us this month and helping us do just that!

Categories: Beneficiaries, Philanthropy

Tagged: Benefit, charity, fighting homelessness, homelessness, housing, philanthropy, waltham

How did we choose our monthly beneficiaries?

Bob Perry

Posted on February 23, 2013

Each time I’m asked how I made my original choices of monthly beneficiaries, I confess that my selections were mostly emotional and pragmatic, and not very analytic. As I sought to fill the open slots in our annual giving calendar, most nonprofits that made the cut did so because either their work had tugged at my heartstrings at one time or another, or I had developed a belief that the organization deserved a “good reputation,” or the organization was “the only game in town” as far as I could tell. I had no method of systematic due diligence to qualify any organizations on any technical basis beyond making the determination that each was a registered 501(c)(3) so that our donations would be tax deductible.

As philanthropy matures as a field of endeavor, measuring impact and outcomes is becoming vitally important as a means of demonstrating that donors are getting “bang for the buck.” I’m pleased with this trend because I’ve always been bothered by what I’ve seen referred to as the “punitive ratio,” or the percentage of a nonprofit budget spent on fundraising and/or administrative costs versus mission services or programs. For example, the punitive ratio overlooks the fundraising cost advantage accruing nonprofits that are able to rely on foundation grants versus those who must work hard to fund their budget with a large number of smaller donations. Similarly, organizations in inner cities tend to have higher operating costs than their suburban or rural counterparts.

I want The Benefit Restaurant^® Project – what I represent as “a new model of philanthropy” – to grow, of course. In other words, I want other restaurants to join us and become Benefit Restaurants, to help grow the pool of funding for nonprofits. To do this I will need to be able to demonstrate to fellow restaurant owners that measuring impact and outcomes is possible to do well, and that we’re giving to organizations that have earned our trust, that are putting our gifts to good use. No doubt it can be argued that just about any nonprofit is doing good in their community and in their field of endeavor. I suspect that a standard I will have to meet is proving that our beneficiary nonprofits do their good as well as or better than colleagues serving the same regions and stakeholder.

In my next post I will shine a spotlight on Pine Street Inn, our February beneficiary for four years running. I’ll take a close look at the work they’re doing and at how they’re measuring impacts and outcomes of their efforts.

Categories: Beneficiaries, Philanthropy, Social Enterprise

Tagged: Benefit, charity, philanthropy, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, waltham

A Benefit Restaurant® serving award-winning Cambodian and French cuisine. Located at 663 Main Street, Waltham, MA. – (781) 899-2244

Dine Out for Boston

Mike Millea

Posted on April 30, 2013

Waltham Education and Beyond Foundation

Bob Perry

Posted on April 27, 2013

Horizons for Homeless Children

Bob Perry

Posted on March 27, 2013

Presenting data – it’s a process!

Bob Perry

Posted on March 5, 2013

Impact and Outcomes and Pine Street Inn

Bob Perry

Posted on February 26, 2013

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