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Crossing Borders
Volume 8, Number 1 - Fall 2009
P
& S Program "Reaches the Soul" of Participants
talking with Judy Feldman
From the pile of grant proposals Judy Feldman processed at the Princeton Area Community Foundation (PACF), the one from People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos stood out.
Other organizations promised to meet urgent human needs—for food, shelter, early-childhood education or adult literacy. “But People & Stories came at literacy from a totally different angle and reached the soul of people as opposed to just the brain. I thought, ‘This is different. This may have greater value than you think.’”
Feldman worked for PACF for seven years, then moved to the Princeton Public Library, where she found herself raising money to support Gente y Cuentos as part of the library’s outreach to the Latino community. In 2007, shortly after her retirement, Feldman joined the People & Stories board.
She brings with her a career focus on development and marketing, a reader’s enthusiasm and an eye for administrative fine-tuning that can bolster a non-profit’s mission. That includes helping board members “understand how to best portray this organization when they go out into the world and act as advocates for the group.” She also scrutinized the database and suggested ways to make it more consistent and useful—by including the first names of married women donors, for instance, and recoding information so it can easily be retrieved for annual reports.
While such work may seem unglamorous, Feldman says it’s fundamental. In such tight economic times, nonprofits need to be able to back up the “soul” of their missions with hard data that answers donors’ unspoken question, “Does my gift make a difference?
“We have to talk about how many people go on to get their GED, how many people go on to some other vocational career or college, how many people now have library cards, how many are learning to read and write, how many have now taken an interest in learning English because they went to Gente y Cuentos…The organization has to prove that it does its job well enough that lives are changed.”
Feldman points to recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from state arts and humanities agencies as evidence that People& Stories is proving its worth.
As a board member, she has loved working on annual events such as last May’s benefit with short story writer Amy Hempel. Along with other board members, she attended a coordinator training at the Princeton Public Library and thought it was “terrific—how you read a story and coax people to participate. I thought it was very interesting.”
Feldman has never needing coaxing to read; her current nightstand stack includes Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking; Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Nora Ephron’s wry book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck. “The Didion is wonderful. And I love John Irving. I like Malcolm Gladwell’s books, although I don’t usually like nonfiction. I’m a person who gets lost in good stories.”
When she first retired, Feldman made a point of visiting museums; she started a blog called Nana Central, and she traveled around the country with her husband, Jeff, an investment banker. Now her routine includes some pro-bono consultation for other nonprofits and ample time with her grandchildren, two of whom just moved to Princeton with Feldman’s son and daughter-in-law. Two other grandchildren live in Boston.
“When I read with them, particularly with the nine-year-old who’s reading chapter books, I see that when she reads about a kid who’s different from her, she gets that light in her eyes. It never occurred to me that that happens right from the time we’re able to read.”