Participants:
Eileen Wirth, President/CEO, MEND
Mike O’Malley, Executive Director, Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge
Shaun Elliott, President/CEO, Greater Philadelphia YMCA
Phillip W. Heath, President/CEO, Samaritan
Rachael Glashan Rupisan, Executive Director, Alice Paul Institute
Tamirra Williams, Vice President, Oaks Integrated Care
Gisele DiNatale, President/Co-Founder, Alicia Rose Victorious Foundation
Judi London, Chief Strategy Officer, Bancroft
Pamela Brant, President, Symphony in C
Marla Meyers, Executive Director, The Legacy Foundation

So many organizations in South Jersey are committed to helping – to doing work that benefits us all. For the passionate people who dedicate their lives to making a difference, the work can be sometimes challenging, but always rewarding. We asked some nonprofit professionals to join us for one of our special roundtables to talk about their meaningful work.

What their organization does…

This year, Bancroft is recognizing its 140th anniversary as a critical organization with a very rich legacy. We support the lives of children and adults who are living with autism, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and who are recovering or rehabilitating from a traumatic brain injury. We really are helping people live their best lives.
Judi London

Samaritan is a leading provider of primary home-based care, palliative medicine and hospice services. Most people know us as a hospice organization, but we’re more than that now.
Phillip W. Heath

Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge is a 171-acre nature center, wildlife refuge and wildlife rehabilitation hospital. Many folks find out about us because of our wildlife rehabilitation hospital that treats over 6,000 injured and orphaned wild animals every year.
Mike O’Malley

Symphony in C is a unique organization, because we are one of 3 professional training orchestras in the United States. What that means is we work with current students or recent graduates from the major music conservatories in the mid-Atlantic region, giving them training so they can audition for major orchestras.
Pamela Brant

Oaks Integrated Care is dedicated to improving the quality of life for children, adults and families living with mental illness, addiction or developmental disability. We offer over 200 health and social service programs throughout New Jersey.
Tamirra Williams

Mend is a housing nonprofit. So very simply put, we are a developer, owner and manager of affordable rental homes. We have about 800 homes available in the greater Burlington County area.
Eileen Wirth

Legacy Treatment Services is a statewide behavioral and mental health organization. We assist 20,000 clients throughout the state. Our mission is to provide behavioral health care that is accessible, effective and evidence-based.
Marla Meyers

We serve about 250,000 people annually – we’re the largest licensed provider of child care in the area, and we have overnight camp, social responsibility programs, youth leadership programs and a host of other programs outside our own walls. We operate throughout the greater Philadelphia area, which includes Burlington and Camden Counties in South Jersey.
Shaun Elliott

We provide age-appropriate programs and activities for hospitalized children who are being treated for cancer or any life-threatening illness throughout the country. We put together 2,000 teen kits and also provide things like teen lounges and Alicia’s Art Cart within hospitals.
Gisele DiNatale

We use history as a way to inspire people to take action for themselves in their communities. We do that through youth leadership development programs. We also steward Alice Paul’s childhood home, which is located right in Mt. Laurel. And we advocate for the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Alice co-authored in 1923.
Rachael Glashan Rupisan

An example of the good they do…

We had gotten an injured red-tailed hawk in our wildlife hospital, and it had a federal band on its leg, so we could look up its history. We found that this bird was a 20-year-old red-tailed hawk that had been banded when it was a nestling. Fortunately, we were able to release her back into the wild after a full course of rehabilitation. It was really exciting for us to get that bird back out into the wild after 20 years.
Mike O’Malley

I received a wonderful note from a woman whose young child had been having enormous difficulty fitting in at school. She spent a couple of weeks at our overnight camp, where she had an opportunity to be herself and get positive reinforcement. Her mother wrote saying her daughter had come back a different child – more confident, able to socialize. She’s succeeding at school. That’s just one of thousands of stories we hear every year. It’s a reminder of the difference we can make in people’s lives.
Shaun Elliott

A couple years ago there was a mass shooting in Cumberland County, and some of our staff went out to meet the individuals who were impacted to provide counseling services on the spot. If anyone wasn’t ready to talk about such a traumatic event, we provided information so when they were ready, they could receive the support they needed. It was powerful to be able to go directly into the community and provide support.
Tamirra Williams

Each year, our girls Leadership Council, which is a feminist club for teen girls, does a service project in the community. This past year, they installed a period pantry at the Cherry Hill Public Library. Period poverty is when girls and women do not have access to feminine hygiene products, so it disables them from being able to do things like go to school or work. So the girls of our Leadership Council took it upon themselves to create the pantry, stock the pantry, fundraise for the pantry and find a community partner to work with to install the pantry. To date, the pantry has been wiped out, which really highlights a need in South Jersey. That is something I’m just so proud of.
Rachael Glashan Rupisan

We had a 75-year-old woman who had been renting a house for 20 years. Her house had just been sold and she was being evicted. She was on Social Security and had no idea where to go. A lot of times there’s a waiting list for affordable housing, but it just so happened we had a property that was accepting applications, and this woman was the right fit. She didn’t have to experience homelessness at 75 years old. I mean, that’s why we do what we do.
Eileen Wirth

One time we were visiting one of our teen lounges at a hospital and I saw a father standing outside a patient room with his hands covering his head. I went over and asked if there was anything I could do. He told me he hadn’t been able to make his daughter smile in 2 days. “Somebody gave her this box,” he said, “and she’s smiling.” I peeked in the room, and she was sitting up in her bed with one of our teen kits. She was taking out every item, smiling. It just reiterated that, if this small item could bring that kind of joy to a girl during her treatment and take some pressure off this father, then this mission is doing what it was intended to do. It was a great inspiration for us to continue.
Gisele DiNatale

My story is actually very personal. About a year ago, my wife and I decided to move her parents from Seattle to New Jersey. At Samaritan, we’ve made a tremendous impact with our home-based primary care – we have a team of physicians and nurse practitioners who now visit individuals in their homes. So my in-laws chose this service, and it has been wonderful for them. My father-in-law loves that he sits at home and the podiatrist comes to him. He loves that we have mobile x-rays that come to him. The quality of their life has improved, and I don’t say that because it’s our organization. I say that because of my personal experience. I see it working.
Phillip W. Heath

A family from California was desperately seeking to place their son with severe autism in Bancroft’s Lindens Neurobehavioral Stabilization Program. The state informed the parents that their son would be placed in a psychiatric facility if they didn’t make proper arrangements for his care. The family was working against the clock to prevent that from happening. Working with their attorney and the Bancroft team to get the state on board and the finances lined up, the young man entered the Lindens program. Now an adult, he is a resident at one of Bancroft’s programs and thriving.
Judi London

We had a student, Alessandra, who came through our summer camp and our youth orchestra. When she wanted to go to college, my colleague and I were at The College of Performing Arts at Rowan and realized this could be a good home for her, so our staff helped her through the audition and application process, and she got in. Now 4 years later, Alessandra just graduated with her degree in music education. This summer, she had her first professional teaching position at our summer camp, where it all started for her. And she was just hired by the Camden charter school where she attended to take the position of her old music teacher.
Pamela Brant

We have a program called the Dreamers Entrepreneurial Program, which is designed to teach challenged youth how to start and run businesses so they have marketable skills that can lead to real career opportunities. The youth actually go through a job interview to get into the program. During one interview, a young man suggested he could clean up the café the students run as part of the program. But our staff asked what job he really wanted, and he said he wanted to be a chef, so that’s what he did. After months in the Dreamer program, he told us that after his treatment and therapy are done and he goes back to his community, he feels he has a chance to do something special, something he loves. It means a lot to hear that.
Marla Meyers

A great challenge…

Our biggest challenge is the resistance to affordable housing – you know, “not in my backyard.”
Eileen Wirth

Many people don’t realize that we started in this community over 40 years ago as a not-for-profit, and we still are. Today, two-thirds of the providers in our industry are for-profit and backed by private equity organizations. We’re very fortunate that in the ’80s, Medicare and Medicaid started supporting the payment of hospice services, but we do a lot of above-and-beyond services that are not reimbursed. And that becomes the real challenge for us to remain viable and engaged.
Phillip W. Heath

The world has become much more attuned and sensitive to mental health issues, and substance abuse and behavioral health issues, which is great. But we have a far way to go, because there still is this underlying stigma about mental health and behavioral health issues. That’s a challenge for all human services organizations.
Marla Meyers

The mission at the Alice Paul Institute is gender equality for all people. Our biggest challenge is that most people in our country think that exists already. We really try to focus on educating the public about the inequities that still exist for women and that have continued to exist.
Rachael Glashan Rupisan

Since Covid, there are a lot of real and perceived barriers to getting people back in the concert hall, particularly when your demographic is older. How do you get people to go from streaming a concert while sitting on the couch to attending a concert in person, which had been routine for them before? We’re starting to see some progress there, but it requires us to be on our game and to effectively say, “Come back and experience what you love, and here are all the reasons why.”
Pamela Brant

Funding is always a challenge. At Cedar Run, a lot of folks think the services we provide must be paid for by a government entity. That’s not the case. We say that, on average, if everyone who dropped off an animal donated $85 per animal, we would be fully funded. The average donation is about $16. So making up that gap is definitely a challenge.
Mike O’Malley

At Oaks, we have a large number of individuals who are trying to find affordable housing, and they have a subsidy. But unfortunately, the market for housing is so high that we’re unable to identify places that will take their voucher. In previous years, having a voucher was like your golden ticket – landlords wanted to take those because they were guaranteed they’d be paid. It’s a serious issue.
Tamirra Williams

Universally, finding the right people with the right mindset and the big hearts to do the work we do is so important. To retain them requires us to provide an unparalleled work experience. Part of our plan is to find ways and systems to make their job easier, so they can spend more time with the individual they serve. We also are committed to the health and wellness of our employees.
Judi London

As a large provider of childcare, I can say it’s woefully underfunded. For the hard work our staff does, they’re just not paid enough. It’s a real public policy issue. We’re also seeing more and more behavioral issues with children in our programs. We’re working with some foundations to get funding around behavioral specialists, so we can help our staff help these kids deal with post-pandemic problems. But honestly, it was trending up even before the pandemic.
Shaun Elliott

A significant project they’re working on…

We’re working on the restoration of Paulsdale, which is Alice Paul’s childhood home in Mt. Laurel. It includes updating our permanent exhibit to show a fuller scope of the history of the women’s movement, so anyone who walks into our space can feel represented on the walls.
Rachael Glashan Rupisan

We have 2 major projects: One is working to address social isolation and loneliness, which is a real issue. The second is our Boccolini Institute, named in honor of our previous CEO, Mary Ann Boccolini. We’ve established an Institute for Education, Research and Innovation. We believe that to better understand our community and to better understand this kind of work, there needs to be research.
Phillip W. Heath

There is a significant initiative in the state of New Jersey to provide Pre-K opportunities to parents, so kids have a good shot at doing well in school. This funding goes to the local school district, and the Mt. Laurel school district was looking for community partners. They needed 7-10 classrooms in the first year of this program. We were able to find a location on Briggs Road, and we invested about a million dollars in renovations. We opened to support about 110 children on behalf of the Mt. Laurel School District. Parents and kids will benefit from this, so we’re really excited.
Shaun Elliott

We are running a capital campaign to raise funds to build an enclosure for a non-releasable red fox who came in as a baby fox with a non-repairable leg fracture. We are fundraising $70,000 to build a permanent home for her right in the middle of our wildlife housing area.
Mike O’Malley

Growing to meet the needs of people who need us is really our focus right now. The demand for services is extremely strong. We want to make sure people have the best possible opportunity to live their best lives. It is critical.
Judi London

We are partnering with the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office to participate in an expungement event. We were also recently awarded a mental health pretrial expungement diversion program, which serves individuals who have criminal charges – we work with them to provide mental health services, counseling, assisting with housing and things of that nature.
Tamirra Williams

We just had our 21st annual birthday bash with over 300 guests. Then we will be in teen kit mode – we’ll be assembling 500 teen kits.
Gisele DiNatale

We are in a capital campaign, raising money to support the orchestra long term, so we can put money in a permanently restricted endowment that we can draw from every year. We’ve been seeing a decline in support from foundations and corporations, so we’re looking at how we can fill that gap.
Pamela Brant

We have been talking to a landowner about developing more affordable housing. Everything’s starting to fall into place – the municipality seems to be supportive, the landowner is on board, and we’re pulling together a team to submit the funding applications. If everything goes well, we’re looking to develop family housing, with a preference for veterans. It would be so great if we can provide additional family housing in the South Jersey community.
Eileen Wirth

On volunteers…

We absolutely rely on volunteers. They’re the backbone of our program. For 20 years, a group of volunteers have come in every week. They sew 2000 pillows and stuff the teen kits. Pretty much anything we need done in the office, they are there to do that.
Gisele DiNatale

We use volunteers in a variety of different ways. We’ve had individuals complete landscaping in some of our residential group homes. A volunteer put together a mural at one of our juvenile homes. We also use volunteers at events, like our Touch-A-Truck event. It’s essential for us to have volunteers.
Tamirra Williams

Volunteers are a vital link to our organization. We have over 400 volunteers – from visiting patients to working in the office to greeting guests at our Samaritan Center in Voorhees. At our thrift store, we use volunteers. And our board of directors, of course, is a volunteer board.
Phillip W. Heath

We love our volunteers! We’re actually working on an ambassador program for individuals who might like to represent us in the community. We’re often asked to have a table at events, so we can use some support in that area.
Rachael Glashan Rupisan

It’s really special when volunteers come together and feel they’ve done good. They’re the ones collecting hygiene kits for kids entering a residential home. Or they’re part of our quilt makers society or working on a beautification project at one of the homes. We also recently had a company who held a drive and dropped off tons of socks, which is actually something that is most needed for people who are at risk of homelessness. There are so many ways our volunteers help us – and we’re grateful for that.
Marla Meyers

Volunteers are essential to our mission, and it starts at the highest of levels, with our board of directors. At our branch level, we have advisory boards who provide input into the services we deliver locally. Then of course, we have volunteers coaching basketball, delivering meals, helping us fundraise, sitting on a task force. They are absolutely crucial to our mission.
Shaun Elliott

You cannot achieve the work of a nonprofit without a dedicated group of volunteers. We have highly dedicated, highly motivated volunteers who are mission caretakers. They serve on our board, serve on committees, or say we’re having a big concert with 2000 kids attending – volunteers help kids get off buses and get to their seats. Volunteers help us do the work we do.
Pamela Brant

What people should know…

People tend to think the individuals we serve are dangerous, and they shouldn’t have the same rights that everyone is entitled to, just based off the challenges they have, whether it’s substance abuse issues or having a developmental disability. But all people deserve the same rights.
Tamirra Williams

Environmental conservation is not a fun extra in life. It’s absolutely essential.
Mike O’Malley

We’re a 170-year-old organization that measures its work in decades. I wish more people understood the great depth of services we provide and how we are making a safer, more engaged community.
Shaun Elliott

Affordable housing is the foundation for so many things in life. Having a safe, stable, affordable place to live, is critical to everything.
Eileen Wirth

80 cents of every dollar that’s donated to us goes directly to a child who has a critical illness.
Gisele DiNatale

In addition to hospice care, Samaritan provides services that span any stage of serious illness at any age, from primary care to palliative care to hospice care.
Phillip W. Heath

140 years ago, Bancroft started as a school in Haddonfield, but we’re now so much more than that. We have close to 300 group homes in 3 states. We have 5 day programs and several vocational programs. We have a brain injury rehabilitation division in 3 regions of New Jersey. We take great pride in our school, but there’s a bigger picture, and a bigger impact.
Judi London

A training orchestra is like a AAA baseball team.
Pamela Brant

Feminism is for everyone.
Rachael Glashan Rupisan

Legacy is here. We’re ready to help anyone who is facing a challenge in life.
Marla Meyers