Bread And Roses

Singer-activists Earl Robinson, Si Kahn and Jane Sapp are Saturday night at a fund-raising gala for The Bread and Roses Community Fund, entering its second decade of supporting social change organizations in the Delaware Valley. The event, "A Tribute to Change, Not Charity," also honors people who have made a difference: poet Sonia Sanchez; Mabel Bolden, a hospital worker and a Bread and Roses board member; John Ruthrauff, director of The Philadelphia Foundation, which makes grants to non-profit organizations in Southeastern Pennsylvania; and Raul Serrano, a longtime activist with the Spring Garden United Neighbors.

Carmen Febo-San Miguel, executive director of Taller Puertorriqueño since 1999, has been named recipient of the 2010 Paul Robeson lifetime achievement award, given annually by the Bread and Roses Community Fund to honor individuals and groups involved in social change. Febo-San Miguel, 62, is a physician who grew up in Puerto Rico before coming to Philadelphia for her residency in family medicine at Hahnemann University Hospital. She was a board member of Taller, the Kensington-based Latino cultural organization, for 15 years before taking over as director.

During the holiday season, our contributors are highlighting the miraculous work done by some local nonprofits and charities. AFRIEND recently visited Philadelphia. He was driving from western Pennsylvania, and there was a huge accident on the turnpike. He took a back way into the city, and wound up driving right through some of the worst pockets of poverty in Philadelphia. It was a side of the city he'd never seen, though he'd visited half a dozen times. He was taken aback at the abandoned houses, streets in disrepair and vacant storefronts.

For 25 years, the Bread and Roses Community Fund has been working for social and economic justice in Philadelphia. A partnership of donors and activists committed to building a financial base for the struggles it underwrites, Bread and Roses is dedicating this weekend to a celebration of itself - a quarter-century of what it touts as "funding change, not charity. " Festivities began last night with a reception at 30th Street Station, with U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, state Sen. Roxanne Jones and City Councilman Angel Ortiz scheduled to speak.

With Bread and Roses, Ken Loach demonstrates that the issues that have long engaged and enraged him as a maverick filmmaker in Britain travel well. His movie argues persuasively and powerfully that the exploitation of the helpless and the downtrodden is an unfortunate trait of human nature that knows no national boundaries. Loach, whose works are so often devoted to the wrongs that the haves inflict on the have-nothings, has found congenial territory for his first American film.

The Bread and Roses Community Fund, which has gained a reputation for funding activists engaged in sometimes controversial work, is about to embark on its third decade, funding "progressive" and sometimes radical causes in the Philadelphia area. Speaking at the group's second annual awards dinner, incoming executive director Judy Claude noted the changes in Eastern Europe and South Africa and said the United States could not expect to be exempt from radical change. "Bread and Roses is here to tell you that change is going to come," said Claude, who will replace Ann Doley, the fund's executive director for the last 12 years.

Christie Balka figured she had stumbled onto something when a regular donor sent Bread and Roses Community Fund a letter and a check. The donor wrote that she would rather give her tax rebate to an organization that was pushing the government to spend money on the poor than return it to the middle- and upper-class people who already earn at least enough to pay taxes. "We had an idea that we had a spontaneous tax rebellion on our hands," said Balka, who heads the Philadelphia social justice group.

Nobody called it a farewell, but there were tears along with the cheers yesterday as Philadelphia's activists in a score of causes saluted the Rev. David Gracie. Gracie, 68, an Episcopal priest, remained at his Roxborough home, in hospice care and weakened with leukemia, as the Bread and Roses Community Fund paid tribute to his lifetime on the barricades. The Rev. Joan Martin, who served as Gracie's co-campus minister at Temple University, read off a dozen organizations Gracie has supported and invited members of the audience to stand for their group.

Most nights, Kenneth Williams, a janitor from North Philadelphia, spends his hours in a suburban office building in West Chester, cleaning floors and emptying trash. On Tuesday, he and about 20 other janitors caught a midday movie matinee at the Ritz at the Bourse in Center City. Playing on the screen was Bread and Roses, a fictionalized account of the janitors who organized themselves into a union in Los Angeles. For Williams and the others, the movie rang true. They are involved in a similar effort to convince suburban janitors to join Service Employees International Union AFL-CIO Local 36. Their goals are to gain medical benefits and to boost wages, which are as much as 50 percent less for janitors in the suburbs than for city janitors.

Carmen Febo-San Miguel, executive director of Taller Puertorriqueño since 1999, has been named recipient of the 2010 Paul Robeson lifetime achievement award, given annually by the Bread and Roses Community Fund to honor individuals and groups involved in social change. Febo-San Miguel, 62, is a physician who grew up in Puerto Rico before coming to Philadelphia for her residency in family medicine at Hahnemann University Hospital. She was a board member of Taller, the Kensington-based Latino cultural organization, for 15 years before taking over as director.

Jacqueline Coren never scoffs when people ask who Anna Crusis was and why a nationally known feminist, lesbian-friendly Philadelphia women's choir bears her name. If nothing else, Coren says, the question at least indicates that Anna Crusis is on people's radar. But anacrusis is a classical-music term describing the unaccented - or "feminine" - upbeat that sets the stage for a downbeat. And Anna Crusis is a pun, an apt name for a choir of diverse women who give voice to the need for social change.

During the holiday season, our contributors are highlighting the miraculous work done by some local nonprofits and charities. AFRIEND recently visited Philadelphia. He was driving from western Pennsylvania, and there was a huge accident on the turnpike. He took a back way into the city, and wound up driving right through some of the worst pockets of poverty in Philadelphia. It was a side of the city he'd never seen, though he'd visited half a dozen times. He was taken aback at the abandoned houses, streets in disrepair and vacant storefronts.

Christie Balka figured she had stumbled onto something when a regular donor sent Bread and Roses Community Fund a letter and a check. The donor wrote that she would rather give her tax rebate to an organization that was pushing the government to spend money on the poor than return it to the middle- and upper-class people who already earn at least enough to pay taxes. "We had an idea that we had a spontaneous tax rebellion on our hands," said Balka, who heads the Philadelphia social justice group.

Most nights, Kenneth Williams, a janitor from North Philadelphia, spends his hours in a suburban office building in West Chester, cleaning floors and emptying trash. On Tuesday, he and about 20 other janitors caught a midday movie matinee at the Ritz at the Bourse in Center City. Playing on the screen was Bread and Roses, a fictionalized account of the janitors who organized themselves into a union in Los Angeles. For Williams and the others, the movie rang true. They are involved in a similar effort to convince suburban janitors to join Service Employees International Union AFL-CIO Local 36. Their goals are to gain medical benefits and to boost wages, which are as much as 50 percent less for janitors in the suburbs than for city janitors.

With Bread and Roses, Ken Loach demonstrates that the issues that have long engaged and enraged him as a maverick filmmaker in Britain travel well. His movie argues persuasively and powerfully that the exploitation of the helpless and the downtrodden is an unfortunate trait of human nature that knows no national boundaries. Loach, whose works are so often devoted to the wrongs that the haves inflict on the have-nothings, has found congenial territory for his first American film.

Nobody called it a farewell, but there were tears along with the cheers yesterday as Philadelphia's activists in a score of causes saluted the Rev. David Gracie. Gracie, 68, an Episcopal priest, remained at his Roxborough home, in hospice care and weakened with leukemia, as the Bread and Roses Community Fund paid tribute to his lifetime on the barricades. The Rev. Joan Martin, who served as Gracie's co-campus minister at Temple University, read off a dozen organizations Gracie has supported and invited members of the audience to stand for their group.

Miriam Seidler, 89, sat patiently in her quiet Center City apartment detailing how she had befriended members of the Black Panther Party, even though she was white; how she had come out foursquare against the death penalty, even though her husband had been murdered; and how she, the daughter of ultra-Orthodox Ukrainian Jews, had become a firebrand social activist who adopted African American women as her "surrogate daughters" and could never seem...

For 25 years, the Bread and Roses Community Fund has been working for social and economic justice in Philadelphia. A partnership of donors and activists committed to building a financial base for the struggles it underwrites, Bread and Roses is dedicating this weekend to a celebration of itself - a quarter-century of what it touts as "funding change, not charity. " Festivities began last night with a reception at 30th Street Station, with U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, state Sen. Roxanne Jones and City Councilman Angel Ortiz scheduled to speak.

Perhaps the thing that strikes you most about all of the contending parties in the current War of the Charities in Philadelphia is that everyone is so nice. It's very hard to believe that the leaders of United Way, Women's Way, the Black United Fund and the Bread and Roses Community Fund are engaged in a struggle in which, their respective leaders would have us believe, the future success of their organizations hangs in the balance. And, in point of fact, everyone is nice; and they are all involved in promoting causes of unimpeachable worth.