Results tagged “nycares”

The annual NY Cares Coat Drive has been extended past this month and into January because there have been fewer donations this season. The organization usually collected 80,000-90,000 coats a year, but this year, they are off that mark by about 10%--which means 8,000 or more people could be without coats. There's increased demand this year and NY Cares executive director Gary Bagley tells NY1, "We're guessing it's probably the economic situation, maybe people are holding to their coats a little longer, they're a little concerned. We're really asking people to dig deep into their closets and come out." Here are details on where you can donate your gently used coats--and NY Cares has receipts so you can get a tax deduction.

    

Last month, we admired reader's photograph of a mural showing a train car and the bold words "Queens is the Future!" The mural's co-creator, Joshua Frankel, emailed us to let us know he and Eve Biddle designed it for the handball court at I.S. 45 in Jackson Heights, Queens, and it was painted as part of NYCares Day last year.

Despite the warm winter weather, coat drives have not lost momentum this season in comparison to coat sales.

The 25 year old program was started by New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, who also got James Beard involved, and Citymeals on Wheels supports agencies that provide "weekend, holiday, emergency and weekday meals to homebound elderly New Yorkers who can no longer shop or cook for themselves." Greene told NY1, "How can I as a restaurant critic, eating the way I eat, living the life I live, accept that there are people on my block who don't have enough to eat?"



You can donate to Citymeals on Wheels. (Earlier this week, the NY Times had a feature about Citymeals on Wheels.) NY1 also noted that 400 volunteers from God's Love We Deliver were working to bring holiday meals to men, women and children with HIV, AIDS, cancer and other illnesses - here's more information about GLWD.



And if you haven't gotten around to donating in some way, big or small, this season, don't worry, there are always opportunities. For instance, you can still donate a coat through NY Cares Coat Drive until December 31. City Harvest's canned food drive ends in mid-January. And here are some more ways to volunteer, via the city's volunteer website, Volunteer NYC.

There is a lot to be said about Warren Buffett's announcement that most of his billions-of-dollars fortune will be given to charities, with particular focus on giving about $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And we hope his actions, as well as those of the Gateses, reverbate through billionaire and millionaire circles, because giving back to the world that made them rich makes sense - tax incentives or no. For instance, when Ted Turner donated $1 billion to the U.N. in stock, he said, "When I got my statement in January. I was worth $2.2 billion. Then I got another statement in August that said I was worth $3.2 billion. So I figure its only nine months' earnings, who cares?"

Two new locations in the Park Slope/Windsor Terrace neighborhoods of Brooklyn have discovered that giving is one way to bring in the people.

Today the Department of Education introduced new school hours that will give extra time for students who need tutoring. Parents and pundits are wonderig why the new changes are happening in the middle of a semester, versus the calendar year or a new school years, but this just seems like the usual DoE wackiness. Plus the DoE decided that the extra school period should be 37.5 minutes long, which makes Gothamist wonder if DoE doesn't like to round up. (It's actually because the DoE is using 150 minutes a week, over four days, to devote to the tutoring.)

The ballyhooed big snow did arrive, and the snowflakes are yooge. They are like millions of little clumpy chunks of Gothamist's "school's closed" dreams, but, alas, we have no car and live in a city with a great, working (for now) mass transit system. And, besides, if we were NYC public school students, NYC schools are open so no sledding in the park for us. We saw salt being dumped on streets yesterday, but will that be enough for the expected six inches we're getting luckily? (Actually, we're likely to get two to four inches.) The snow is supposedly to start melting tomorrow afternoon, which could mean an icy Saturday night. Snow boots and layered clothing are a must if you're traveling outside. And this is a good time to remind you about the NY Cares Coat Drive - donated a gently worn coat to someone who really needs one.

What better way to get involved with volunteering than participating in NY Cares Day this Saturday, October 23. NY Cares has been sending volunteers to help tutor kids, organize libraries, teach seniors how to use computers, and on NY Cares Day, over 8,000 people will be helping out at city schools and raising money for them.

Some terrible and just plain strange crime stories involving older New Yorkers:

We found this NY1 story about Fulton Fish Market purveyors donating fish to the homeless really great. The fish are all fresh (one purveyor says, "The sea provides so much product sometimes you can’t sell it all"), and they are donated to 12 food pantries in the city. A few different agencies to donate your time or money: City Harvest, New York City Rescue Mission, and NY Cares. You can also find volunteer positions via Volunteer Match.

Hmm. Gothamist certainly supports a notion of community, being a part of a New York we can be proud of, and volunteer work. But no way are we volunteering for the convention - we still have beef with the GOP for the whole cruise ship thing. Full page ads for NYC2004 are running in the city's newspapers (click the image above to see the full ad), and there will be outdoor ads as well. Gothamist does think this picture of an elephant trying to eat Ed Koch is pretty sweet. [Slightly related: Gothamist on Ed Koch's movie reviews.] The NY Times's Michael Slackman writes about the effort, "Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican who has been cautious about appearing too close to President Bush, and Mr. Koch, a Democrat who has endorsed Mr. Bush for re-election, sounded as if they were trying to persuade New Yorkers to behave when the Republicans come to town."