News & Announcements
Israel: Portrait of a Work in Progress
HAARETZ - January 20, 2012 — Stephen Shore’s career began at the age of 6. An uncle who recognized his innate talent and interest gave him a birthday gift of a Kodak starter kit for developing film. His first pictures - family snapshots - were developed and printed in his parents’ bathroom. Three years later, he began taking pictures with a standard 35mm camera and developing them in a local darkroom in his hometown, New York City.
Shore took his next step on the way to the photographers' hall of fame at the tender age of 14. Equipped with no small amount of daring, audacity and the naivete of an adolescent, he called the photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and asked to meet with him. The people at the museum, who realized the talent in the teenager, bought three works from him.
Read the complete article (one of a series).
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ODYSSEY NETWORKS - January 17, 2012 — After fulfilling careers, seniors Nancy Cafferty and Sayyid Tirmizi are committed to giving back. In exchange for a small stipend from a non-profit, ReServe, the former museum finance director and professor assist library patrons with their job searches in Jamaica, Queens. ReServe helps nonprofits, schools, and public agencies fill skills-based, part-time positions with experienced professionals.
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"In a Second Career, Working to Make a Difference"
THE NEW YORK TIMES - January 5, 2012 — At the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change, a public school on West 135th Street in Harlem, every one of the 82 members of the senior class is expected to apply to college. At a suburban or private school, or at a wealthier city school, these seniors would have all the help they need. They would have been raised in families where going to college is a given. They would have advisers who know about a wide range of colleges and have contacts in admissions offices. They would take test-prep courses and rewrite their personal essays numerous times with the help of a savvy editor. They would have a list of deadlines to meet and be constantly pushed to meet them by parents and school advisers.
Thurgood Marshall, by contrast, provides Nicholas Raschella.
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Training Young People to Be Skeptical Media Consumers
Conference Featured in the New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES - November 10, 2011 — Is there a mismatch between the housing New Yorkers need and the housing that gets built? Only 17 percent of dwelling units in the city are occupied by parents raising children under 25, according to the nonprofit Citizens Housing and Planning Council, but most new homes are designed with such traditional families in mind.
What is missing, housing advocates say, are homes for people who can afford only a little bit of space; living quarters large enough for four or more unrelated adults to share; and “accessory dwellings” for people who want to live close to family members who own single-family houses.
The absence of affordable housing for artists, actors, musicians and writers hoping to gain a foothold in New York is of particular concern. “We’re losing a lot of creative people to places like Buffalo and Berlin,” said Matt Blesso, a developer.
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Published in the Jerusalem Post
JERUSALEM POST - August 31, 2011 — Looting in Britain’s cities, mass demonstrations in the Arab world, protests in Greece; none have the same possibility of a straightforward solution as does the recent uprising (largely of the middle class) in Israel in response to a lack of affordable housing. What began as a single person’s fight against eviction quickly became a mass movement from all sectors of Israeli society-Jewish and Arab - defenseless against housing costs that have skyrocketed by more than 40% in three years. And while pundits debate the underlying causes of Britain’s social unrest, experts hope that democracy will emerge triumphant in the Arab world, and everyone holds their breath that Europe’s debt crisis will be resolved; Israel’s affordable housing crisis can most certainly be fixed.
The solutions to Israel’s crisis will not be found in the ‘Free Market’ approach favored by the current government, or in a return to the country’s socialist origins. Rather, the government should look to New York City, where a hybrid model of public/private partnerships has produced hundreds of thousands of housing units affordable to everyone. By combining public financing incentives that attract private capital, land disposition strategies to promote economically diverse communities, and a wide range of private and nonprofit developers to construct and manage properties, New York could well be the blueprint for Israel.
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WALL STREET JOURNAL - November 15, 2010 — The Charles H. Revson Foundation, created in 1956 by the Revlon cosmetics company founder and funded with half of his estate at his death, sees itself as a steward of New York City.
To that end, the foundation will Monday announce a $1 million donation to WNYC toward the public radio station's new three-year initiative to expand the scope of its local news journalism.
"The pressing issues and challenges facing New York today demand we maintain a platform for rigorous, authoritative public-affairs reporting," says Julie Sandorf, the foundation's president. "In order for a democracy to succeed, robust reporting is essential to supporting and sustaining an informed and active citizenry."
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Published in New York Daily News
Today, in the midst of the greatest revolution in access to information since Gutenberg - with notebooks and eBooks commonplace and tablet computers coming down the pike - we must rewrite that partnership to ensure that New York City's libraries can move fully into the digital age.
Read the complete article on the
New York Daily News web site.
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State of Journalism in America
Read the report on the Columbia Journalism Review web site.
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Revson Foundation to Create Center for Pastoral Education
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| Rabbi Mychal Springer: New JTS pastoral care initiative “will deepen our engagement” with Union Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College. |
JEWISH WEEK - September 25, 2009 — Armed with a $500,000 grant from the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Jewish Theological Seminary will expand its clinical pastoral training program, “institutionalize it and make JTS ... the center for clinical pastoral education in the City of New York.”
Download this article from Jewish Week as a PDF.
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