Community Partners for Hope of New Jersey
Doing Good!
PO Box 532 Pompton Plains, NJ 07444
info@cpfhnj.org
We are a grassroots 501(c)(3) charity based in Pequannock Township, NJ. We are completely volunteer-driven with NO paid employees or consultants.
(Contributions are fully deductible to the extent permitted under tax laws.)
Our mission is threefold:
to educate communities about critical social problems affecting them and others in the world and to produce events in which some positive action is taken to address the consequences of these problems
to promote volunteerism and, especially, volunteer leadership among our youth
to share our highly successful concepts and techniques with other communities to enable a broader geographic approach to achieve our primary goals.
Volunteerism
As a successful organization led and operated completely by volunteers, we have a selfish motive to ensure that our work continues well into the future. We have committed ourselves to promoting volunteerism among our communities, with special emphasis on enabling our youth to step up as volunteers and volunteer leaders. Lessons they learn today in being volunteers and effectively leading other volunteers will help develop a more capable, committed and resolute body of adults with the skills and values to continue doing good for mankind.
Social Problems in our focus
We currently are focusing on two areas:
Addressing HUNGER in all its forms (malnutrition, food insecurity and starvation)
Improving MENTAL HEALTH, especially as it relates to issues arising from substance dependency, bullying, human exploitation and homelessness.
Our History
Hunger was our original focus. When the initiative of one local congregation to join in a national movement to help feed the starving in Haiti turned out to be a great success, their Pastor wisely decided to expand their program into a community effort. Her intent was to ensure that it could be far more successful with broad-based support and leadership. Leveraging already-good relationships with other churches and civic organizations in our community and nearby, the food packing event the following year was met with resounding success. The newly enlarged ad-hoc leadership of the event became the cornerstone of a string of future successes. Reflecting on this history of success, the core team considered expanding the scope and direction of the program. This resulted in our incorporation in New Jersey as Community Partners for Hope of NJ, Inc. and then our seeking (and receiving) tax exempt charity status under Section 501(c)(3) from the Federal government. With these accomplishments, we are now able to raise fund directly while offering our contributors the benefit of a tax deduction. Moreover, the formality of creating a not-for-profit corporation with a Board of Directors has opened additional opportunities for us in fund raising and cooperation with others.
With this accomplishment, Community Partners for Hope of NJ, Inc. began to expand its focus to key areas of mental health, initially targeting substance dependency
Hunger Initiatives
We began as a simple local program to feed the hungry. Our initial effort was packing super-nutritious dry food ingredients into sealed bags of six meals each. These meals could be prepared by simply mixing the contents with boiling water. Our target beneficiaries were initially the hungry in Haiti. Hundreds of local residents participated in the first event held in a local school gym on a Sunday afternoon. Using that model under the program name Grains of Hope, we packaged many more meals in subsequent years, and added to our beneficiaries the residents of the Philippines and the New Jersey coast who were impacted by devastating storms, Ukrainian refugees, and the poor in the inner cities of New Jersey, particularly in Newark.
This March (2024) we will have packaged more than 2 MILLION meals in our events since inception.
Moreover, through our example and direct encouragement, other organizations have followed our lead to package many more meals for the hungry using our event model.
Our efforts in this space are fully dependent on the good will and hard work of our many volunteers, and the financial support of our area churches, companies, civic organizations and individuals whose contributions enable us to purchase the ingredients and supplies for our meal packing events. We now regularly attract over 500 people to our individual food packing events. Even during the COVID crisis, our work continued when we took great pains to ensure participants' safety by restructuring our physical set-up to provide recommended social distancing and limited contact.
Hunger didn't take a break for COVID, and neither did we and our volunteer workers!
Our food offerings have always focused on providing scientifically determined super-nutritious meals to deal with the unique adverse effects malnutrition and starvation. We started with a special rice and beans mixture focused on the residents of Haiti and their dietary preferences. We have now evolved to a custom macaroni and cheese meal that better suited to other palates. Both meals offer exceptional nutrition for the hungry.
The effort of packaging these mails by hand in our community gives participants an incredible sense of actually DOING something to help others. In particular, the children who work alongside their parents in helping feed the hungry are energized by their own accomplishments. Many parents have recounted how their young children actually thank them for the opportunity to participate in such a hands-on activity of helping others.
Mental Health Initiatives
Our initial foray into mental health was exposing the reality of drug dependency in our area and exposing the related problems that impact our community and many others. Realizing that previous local attempts to educate the public in our area had experienced limited success, we organized an event in which a nationally recognized speaker (Chris Herren, former NBA star whose career was cut short by drug abuse) addressed our entire high school student body and, in the evening, he made a second public presentation which was open to all residents. In all, over 1,400 people attended his presentations that day. We experienced a breakthrough!
With the extraordinary success of that event, we brought Chris back to speak to our junior high school students and also in a neighboring community. He has been invited back to present several times since. The principals and staff of our area junior high schools have enthusiastically supported his event, time after time.
We also launched a number of other events related to drug dependency, as well as one on bullying, and another on human trafficking. During the height of the COVID pandemic, we led a local campaign to feed dinner to the workers in our local hospital as an expression of our community support for their selfless sacrifices.
In recent years, we were shocked by the number of young people who died needlessly of opioid overdose while partying with friends. It is believed that many were not hard core addicts, but simply teens experimenting with their friends. In many cases, their young friends simply "dumped" the unconscious person on their home's front lawn or porch and ran away, fearing to be implicated in the situation. This act inevitably resulted in the overdose progressing until death. It is a known fact that an opioid overdose can be quickly reversed by the prompt administration of a NARCAN nasal mist by anyone who has been trained and who has the product readily available. With this in mind, we sponsored a program to train anyone who volunteered with the simple procedure to administer NARCAN. We also provide each trained participant with a NARCAN dose so that they would have it immediately if needed.
We are keen to help met the real-time needs of our area youth, and we enjoy a close working relationship with their educators. On request, we respond to an expressed need for a speaker or some other event to help counter problems and challenges currently faced by our students. We also have developed a close working relationships with law enforcement and mental health officials at the local and county level, well-qualified subject matter experts from prestigious national institutions, and the leadership of nationally recognized civic organizations with similar interests. Further, we are currently investigating (with the help of these subject matter experts) the detrimental impacts of social media on our youth, and potential ways to remedy these impacts.
While it appears that we are youth-centered with our mental health topics, we are all too aware of the extensive time span of the identified problems. Some problems started many years before the current crop of school-age children were born, so these problems are also impacting the young adults and middle-aged and older populations in our communities. In particular, we are now experiencing a rising trend of accidental deaths and suicides arising from the effects of long-standing drug use and from the emotional damage arising from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in veterans of the Vietnam and Gulf wars. Mental health problems are simply not a school-age phenomena.
What is our unique strength?
Apart from the extraordinary support from our broad-based volunteer Board of Directors and our event workers and attendees, and the generosity of our financial supporters, our unique strength arises from our core team's previous leadership experience in business and in not-for-profit organizations. The core leadership of this organization is highly experienced in EFFECTIVE planning, organizing, scheduling, logistics, fund raising, public relations, risk management, negotiation and collaboration.
With these skills, we have made sure to reach out within our community (and beyond) to garner support from all sides and to encourage broad engagement in our activities. With this principal, we have managed to achieve great successes as compared to single organizations. We have made sure to emphasize that what we do and how we operate is a COMMUNITY effort, thereby helping assure cooperation and support from all churches, governments, institutions, clubs, schools, companies, civic organizations and individuals.
We are eager to share these skills with like-minded leaders of other communities. Please contact us for more information.
Got a question or a comment? Want to develop your own community program?
We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch using our email (which is in the header of this page).
