Scholarship Spotlight: Ava Michaelides

Meet, Ava, one of our 2022 Scholarship recipients! Ava Michaelides is a freshman at UConn studying environmental engineering. Ava loves pasta, fiction reading, and the earth, and if she had to sit down to dinner with one person (living or dead), she would choose Greta Thunberg.  

Ava graduated from Red Hook High School (RHHS) in 2022 and says that the things she misses the most about Red Hook are the simplicity and the little things. Transitioning from Red Hook to a large school like UConn is a big shift, and Ava’s biggest takeaway is: don’t be afraid to put yourself out there! 

In college, Ava is on the field hockey team and recently helped raise money for HuskyThon, a fundraiser for the Connecticut Children’s Hospital. She is also in the Society of Women Engineers, where eighth-grade girls come to learn about STEM. If Ava could give the present RHHS graduating class any advice, it would be: don’t be afraid to succeed!

Winter Updates

Winter 2023 Updates

The strain of economic uncertainty, along with lingering COVID-19 effects, continued to shape our giving as we listened to advocates both near and far. 2022 was our eighth year of combined ambassador and local giving, with approximately $300,000 in grants and donations distributed to some 44 agencies in the Hudson Valley and in our ambassador neighborhoods. Some highlights of 2022 giving included:

• Adding three new ambassadors to our cohort, bringing the total to 48.

• Sponsoring six scholarships - our 2021 scholars had their scholarships renewed for a second year and we added three new scholars from the 2022 RHHS Class.

• Collaborating for the third year with Dr. Melitski’s Nonprofit Leadership and Management class at Marist. We provided matching donations for students’ fundraising campaigns for two local organizations - Grace Smith House and Special Olympics NY.

• Sponsoring our third No Cost Market at the Red Hook Community Center in November after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic. The Rotary Club and other volunteers assisted in the event which provided poultry and other foodstuffs to about 125 participants.

There is always a spirit of rejuvenation with every calendar year turnover on every level — personal, professional, and organizational — that lifts us up to aspire to an even better year than the one we view in the rearview mirror. 2023 offers us that promise, regardless of our age and experience. May your resolutions last beyond the end of this month and be part of the new you throughout the year!

Local Grants and Happenings

There’s been a lot going on in Red Hook recently!

The other week we presented a check to The Daily Catch. They submitted a grant application seeking funding to support newspaper operations in 2023, specifically enhancing training opportunities for staff. The AFF values building strong local communities, and local journalism can be an integral part of that. You can read more about the grant over on The Daily Catch!

The local Audubon subcommittee had a ribbon cutting ceremony and community gathering of about 30 sustainable partners at Greig Farm in mid-October. The subcommittee educates key stakeholders and the public in all that Red Hook offers, with sustainability across fifteen focus areas as the driving force.

Nourish Your Neighbor is underway: a months-long campaign of food collection at the public schools to benefit our neighbors in the area. We are doing matching contributions to raise money for the food voucher program. The AFF is also sponsoring the third No-Cost Market, which is just around the corner, on November 12th! We’ve loved participating in the No-Cost Markets in the past. They have been great events, full of music, community, and free food (chickens, turkeys, fruit, produce, and more) usually serving over 100 families.

Lastly, voting is on everyone’s mind as we approach the midterms. We applaud our grantee partners at Worker Justice Center of New York in Kingston, For The Many in Poughkeepsie, and the Bard Center for Civic Engagement for their Get Out the Vote efforts! AFF encourages all of you to vote this Nov. 8th.

We are in the middle of our fall grant cycle, reviewing grant applications submitted via our Ambassadors. It’s an exciting time of the year!

Ambassador Spotlight: Maria Barsa

Welcome to another one of our new Ambassadors, Maria Barsa! Maria grew up in Red Hook and lived here her entire life - except for one year in Germany. She had Nick as her teacher in high school every year and was valedictorian! After graduating from RHHS, Maria went to Yale and studied architecture. During college, she was involved with the soup kitchen and loved hearing from the people she worked with and getting to know them. 

After college, Maria moved to New York City and went to architecture school at Columbia. She then worked in the city for a few years, first in design and then in marketing, where she met her husband (who coincidentally had also gone to Yale and then Columbia). After her husband finished his fellowship they moved back upstate. Together they have three daughters.

When asked about which AFF core value resonates with her the most, Maria writes: “Education is about access to information, people, cultures, differing opinions, and resources to broaden our understanding of the world. While I am endlessly grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to study at Yale and Columbia, I’m acutely aware that Ivy League schools, and higher education in general, is not always the best education for everyone. I think you can go through the world’s “best” schools and still come out ignorant, and you can conversely go through life with no formal education of any kind and have boundless wisdom and compassion for humanity.  With that in mind, I think empowering lower-income communities with education means implementing programs and providing resources within those communities just as much as it means giving them access to means beyond their communities.”

We’re excited to have Maria onboard!

Fall Updates

Perhaps the biggest fall news we have is that our annual grant deadline is fast approaching! Local organizations and AFF Ambassadors have until November 1st to submit their grant proposals for our consideration. We are looking forward to reading about the great work everyone is up to.

Even though the grant cycle isn’t yet upon us, we’ve still been busy! Our most recent local grant was extended to the Poughkeepsie Farm Project (PFP). PFP has a food share program on their farm on the campus of Vassar which supports hundreds of families in the area. This is our third year partnering with PFP.

Hardscrabble Day was on September 17th - those of you who’ve grown up or have lived in Red Hook all have vivid memories of that event, no doubt! A recent article in the Daily Catch highlighted the mood and feelings of many in attendance. The Daily Catch was also a recent awardee of an AFF grant. One of our underlying goals is community building, and a local newspaper is essential to that end.

Speaking of communities, Election Day is coming up! Your right to vote is the most basic tenet of our democracy. Unfortunately, it’s counteracted by voter suppression tactics - even in our own backyard at Bard College. A series of court case rulings with additional litigation pending - outlined here - address the fight for a polling sight on Bard’s campus. We’ve contributed to the endeavor to ensure everyone has the ability to vote, with a $10K grant to Elections at Bard through the Center for Civic Engagement. We applaud the leadership at the Center for Civic Engagement in this decades long battle for justice.

We’ve long been working with folks at the CCE, and on Sept. 30th CCE hosted their annual celebration of community partnerships at Blithewood. Some sixty or so folks gathered - Fran, Jen, and Nick were in attendance - to honor a couple of local awardees for their dedication and commitment to community building. Sarah Ugolini, the ED from the RH Community Center - one of our benchmark partners, as well - has orchestrated significant program growth over the last few years.

We’ve also fostered connections with other institutions in the area, including Marist. A few of us met last Tuesday with Dr. Melitski’s Nonprofit Management class answering questions about our work and outlining a matching donation commitment to two local Poughkeepsie agencies. Two groups in the class are in a friendly competition to raise money for Grace Smith House, a center that provides counseling, shelter, and other services to victims of domestic violence and their families, and the Special Olympics of the Hudson Valley. Our match commitment is now in its third year. A matching donation in 2021 led to a full-fledged grant with the Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse this spring!

Lastly, we've always enjoy updates from our Ambassadors and the organizations we’ve funded in the past. Aminy Ostfeld, Ambassador Class of 2015, advocated for We Care Solar/We Share Solar for a number of years. We Share Solar design solar suitcases for energy needs both domestically and internationally. The energy generated provides power for health facilities and schools within those communities where grids are nonexistent. They are now part of our “Legacy Portfolio,” which includes six organizations which can apply to the AFF directly for funding after a history of Ambassador advocacy on their behalf. Aminy continued her wonderful ambassador service with a grant for City Slicker Farms in Oakland, CA. last year.

As always, keep us up to date on your volunteering, endeavors, and anything else!