Caring for our community: Riverdale Neighborhood House

Editorial Comment

Riverdale Neighborhood House

At the Dodge Center at Riverdale Neighborhood House, little children play with blocks, imagining they are building cozy houses and soaring castles. They color and fingerpaint and explore picture books and listen to their teachers read stories. They sing about the wheels on the bus and the itsy-bitsy spider, just as children do at nursery schools, daycare centers and after-school programs everywhere.

They don't know the ways in which their experience isn't like many others in Riverdale.

Neighborhood House has always taken pride in the diversity of its students, but in recent years - as the city has cut funding for low-income families or snarled it in red tape - it has become harder and harder for parents and caregivers who are struggling to escape poverty to find the means to send their children to these excellent programs.

Some of their stories have been heart wrenching. They tell of missing parents and of grandparents whose grandchildren would be lost to them if Neighborhood House weren't there to take care of the kids while they worked. The catch is that when a single mother or grandmother works, she has too high an income to qualify for public assistance, but too little to pay for daycare.

They tell of mothers striving to get a college education only to be told by the city that their benefits would be cut the moment they receive their degree.

The children don't know whether one of the mommies they see each morning and evening was in an abusive relationship. Neighborhood House has helped women to escape and given their children scholarships for childcare.

Many of the grown-ups in our community also don't know that their neighbors include families like these - people living on the margins, who, but for a helping hand, would be unable to care for their children or for themselves.

The stories of these families were told last week, when Neighborhood House held its annual benefit at Riverbank State Park. After hearing them, people in attendance pledged more than $20,000 to a fund that has enabled the community center to continue to offer scholarships to its early childhood programs for families in need.

They heard other success stories as well, of thriving programs for elementary school students, teens, and seniors, the community- supported agriculture project's harvest and the continued popularity of the pool.

The settlement house is planning a new teen center to be built to "green" standards. And at the benefit Sarah Gray Gund, chair of the development committee, announced that generous givers in Riverdale had contributed more than $900,000 to create a million-dollar endowment fund, triggering a $100,000 matching gift from the Dodge Foundation.

That joyous announcement was also a sobering reminder. As the city reeled from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, Neighborhood House faced financial collapse, as well. It staved it off by spending its entire endowment, and has lived, sometimes precariously, without one ever since.

The lesson is that we cannot take even our most venerable institutions for granted. Neighborhood House has made life in Riverdale better for 135 years, but it needs the support of Riverdale's residents to continue to enrich our lives.

Editor's note: Press co-publisher Richard L. Stein is vice president of Riverdale Neighborhood House, on whose board he has served for three decades.

This is part of the October 25, 2007 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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