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Center for Governmental Studies

NIU CGS: Allan Barsema Among 10 Winners of National Purpose Prize

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Civic Ventures The Purpose Prize
OneBodyCollaboratives.org

$100,000 Award Honors Barsema’s Extraordinary Impact in an Encore Career

 

DeKalb, IL — Civic Ventures today announced that Allan Barsema is one of 10 winners of its 2010 Purpose Prize. Now in its fifth year, the six-year, $17 million program is the nation’s only large-scale investment in social entrepreneurs over 60 who, in their encore careers, are using their experience and passion to make an extraordinary impact on society’s biggest challenges.

Barsema, the founder of two Rockford-based non-profit organizations will receive $100,000 for establishing Carpenter’s Place, an outreach center for the homeless in Rockford, and then establishing Community Collaboration, Inc., a non-profit software provider that has developed an online system to coordinate social services, first in Rockford and now expanded into five other states. Barsema now serves as Senior Research Associate for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in NIU Outreach’s Center for Governmental Studies, where he is developing a national program to demonstrate the benefits of greater collaboration among governments and faith-based social service providers.

“Purpose Prize winners are courageous, creative, passionate and strategic – all the qualities needed to make headway on some of our greatest challenges,” said Marc Freedman, Founder and CEO of Civic Ventures and author of the upcoming book The Big Shift (March, PublicAffairs Books). “It is the combination of these qualities, their decades of experience, and the sheer size of the baby boomer population that make social innovators in their encore careers a promising and invaluable asset to society.”

"I am very honored to receive this prize." said Barsema. "The successes of Carpenter's Place and Community Collaboration, Inc. (CCI) demonstrate how people can indeed rebuild their lives when we look at the whole person and work collaboratively to help them. My wife Cathy and I will be reinvesting all of the prize proceeds back into our various works to help rebuild lives and transform communities. This will include the new project, 'One Body Collaboratives', which builds upon the existing efforts by mobilizing church and faith-based resources to collaborate more effectively to address individual, family, and community needs."

Sherry Lansing, CEO of The Sherry Lansing Foundation and former chair of Paramount Pictures’ Motion Picture Group, chairs the jury that selected this year’s winners. The 32 judges – leaders in business, politics, journalism and the nonprofit sector – chose the 10 winners out of a pool of more than 1,400 nominees.

Barsema will join nine other 2009 winners and 46 Purpose Prize Fellows at the Purpose Prize Summit November 12-14 in Philadelphia. The approximately 400 attendees of the invitation-only event will hear from featured speakers such as W. Wilson Goode, Sr. (former mayor of Philadelphia and 2006 Prize winner); writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (author of Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom); civil rights leader and social innovator Robert Moses (founder of The Algebra Project); and bestselling author Martin Seligman (founder of the field of positive psychology).

The Purpose Prize, funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation, is a program of the Encore Careers campaign (www.encore.org), which aims to engage millions of baby boomers in encore careers combining social impact, personal meaning and continued income in the second half of life. The campaign is run by Civic Ventures, a national think tank on boomers, work and social purpose.

Short summaries for all winners are below. Fuller summaries, videos and photographs are online at www.encore.org/prize.

The $100,000 winners are (alphabetically):

  • Allan Barsema, Community Collaboration Inc., Rockford, Ill. – With family support, Barsema broke free from the alcoholism that had cost him his marriage, house and business. His past inspired him to open an outreach center for the homeless and develop an online system to coordinate support services for Rockford-area homeless (tools now being used in five states).
  • Barry Childs, Africa Bridge, Marylhurst, Ore. – Millions of children orphaned by AIDS now live in Tanzania. Childs, who was raised there, returned to help. His organization has set up 28 income-generating farming cooperatives for caregivers in 16 villages and built classrooms and clinics for thousands of African children.
  • Margaret Gordon, West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, Oakland, Calif. – After years of living near the Oakland port, Gordon connected rampant asthma to the pollution in her low-income neighborhood. She transitioned from housekeeper to activist to mayor-appointed commissioner of the country’s fourth-busiest container port.
  • Inez Killingsworth, Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People, Cleveland – When Killingsworth realized that neighbors were being forced out of their homes (victims of predatory lending), she created a nonprofit that helps homeowners avoid foreclosure by negotiating better mortgage terms with banks. The organization helped 8,000 families across Ohio in 2009 alone.
  • Judith Van Ginkel, Every Child Succeeds, Cincinnati – Building on her background in various health care roles, Van Ginkel leads a program that provides in-home services for first-time, at-risk mothers. The program has served more than 16,500 families and built a decade of evidence that home visits by a social worker or nurse during a woman’s pregnancy through her child’s third birthday can improve the lives of both mother and child.

The $50,000 winners are (alphabetically):

  • Barbara Allen, Fresh Artists, Lafayette Hill, Pa. – Allen has come up with a new way to provide funding for art supplies in urban public schools. Her organization invites K-12 students to donate the use of their artwork for large-scale reproduction. Organizations that make donations to Fresh Artists receive images of the artwork for their offices. In turn, Fresh Artists uses the donations to buy art supplies for Philadelphia’s poorest schools.
  • Dana Freyer, Global Partnership for Afghanistan, New York – After NATO forces ousted the Taliban, Freyer set out to help revive Afghanistan. She co-founded a nonprofit that assists rural Afghans in revitalizing woodlots, vineyards and orchards, bringing financial stability to nearly 84,000 people in the war-ravaged country.
  • Hubert Jones, Boston Children’s Chorus, Boston – For six decades, Jones has built and nourished nonprofits that speak to one of our most enduring struggles: race. But his most enduring legacy may rest with the young members of a chorus he founded to unite children across differences of race, religion and economic status.
  • Donald Stedman, New Voices Foundation, Raleigh, N.C. – Stedman believes that few people want to “waste their time” helping children with severe disabilities learn. To change that, he has established an organization that counsels schools on the best strategies to engage seriously disabled students, then helps to assess technological and teacher training needs.
  • Bo Webb, Coal River Mountain Watch, Whitesville, W.Va. – Across Appalachia, mountaintop removal – blasting mountaintops to expose coal – has destroyed at least 500 mountains and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. A former small businessman, Webb retired to his ancestral home for its stunning beauty. Instead, he found himself fighting the coal industry to preserve it.

About Civic Ventures

Civic Ventures is a national think tank on boomers, work and social purpose.

About The Atlantic Philanthropies

The Atlantic Philanthropies are dedicated to bringing about lasting changes in the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. Their work is aimed at ageing, disadvantaged children and youth, population health, and reconciliation and human rights.

About the John Templeton Foundation

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for research and discoveries relating to what scientists and philosophers call the Big Questions. The Foundation supports work at the world’s top universities in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and social science relating to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose and the nature and origin of religious belief.