Joyce Reilly C’74, the
founder of Adesha Village,
decided at a young age
she wanted to spend her
life listening to people tell
their stories.
AN
URGE TO
HEAL
One local organization houses the homeless.
A faraway group promotes peace in the Middle East.
An undergrad knits hats for those in need
across the globe.
Drew has long fostered a passion for
entrepreneurship in the nonprofit world.
“Therewasadeeplycompassionate
and even spiritual background
to most of the people I met in
the psychology department.”
Bill Cardoni
Joyce Reilly C’74
20 Drew Magazine I Drew and Entrepreneurship
FI RST C AME T HE STORI ES. Joyce Reilly C’74 heard them from her
mother—how she’d been orphaned in the flu epidemic of 1918 and spent
her childhood in a succession of foster homes, how Reilly’s father had grown
up dirt poor in an alcoholic household. “My mother had the wisdom to talk
about things in a way that allowed you to see why people ended up doing
what they did,” she says.
Early on, Reilly decided she wanted to spend her life listening to people
tell their stories. It wasn’t long before she figured out she also wanted to heal
their pain. At the age of 12, she hatched a plan for founding a therapeutic
community—a place where people with mental illness could live together
and receive help and support—though it wasn’t until her first day at Drew
that she learned such places actually existed. She met a classmate who had
worked summers at a facility that was, she says, “just what I had in mind.”
Summer 2015 21
ENTREPRENEURS
In Patrick McGuinn’s course,
“Social Policy and Inequality in America,” students
surveyed social service
agencies to determine their
most pressing needs.
After graduating with a degree in psychology, Reilly worked in a
therapeutic community in England and then a psychiatric hospital in
Germany. In 1984 she opened Gheel House, where she lived with six
residents with mental illness, in Kimberton, Pennsylvania. She left
Gheel House after nearly a decade—the community still runs smoothly
today—but the urge to heal continued to inspire her. In 2005 she helped
found Adesha Village, a therapeutic community in Chester Springs,
Pennsylvania, where she still works as a consultant, trainer and mentor
to the staff.
Reilly credits Drew with giving her a new way to think about mental
illness and with nurturing her social conscience. “I had a very strong
sense that there was a deeply compassionate and even spiritual
background to most of the people I met in the psychology department,”
she says.
Throughout its history, Drew has fostered in its students a desire to
give back through creativity, forward thinking, hard work and researchbacked risk-taking. Those traits constitute the very essence of entrepreneurship, even when applied in the nonprofit world. Like their for-profit
counterparts, nonprofit entrepreneurs often start by recognizing a need
and then setting out to fill it. Sometimes their work takes them across the
globe, and sometimes they find a cause in their own backyard.
22 Drew Magazine I Drew and Entrepreneurship
For Emily Kubin, a Drew junior majoring in
psychology, inspiration struck early, when she
spotted a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard
box in Morristown, New Jersey, her hometown.
“I couldn’t understand it,” she says. “How could
we all be living in houses and he didn’t have one?
It bothered me, and I wanted to change it.” In
high school she combined two passions, knitting
and social justice, and started making hats for
the homeless. To date, Emily’s Hats for Hope has
donated some 17,000 hats in Morristown and
across the country, and spawned more than 40
sister groups around the world.
In her sophomore year at Drew, Melanie
Robbins C’11 co-founded PeaceBuilders, an organization promoting grassroots efforts to build an
Israeli-Palestinian peace. Since early adolescence
she’s supported the idea of a Jewish state in Israel,
but during her years at Drew her view of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew more nuanced.
She credits her participation in Drew’s Semester
at the United Nations with opening her eyes to
the world of international nonprofits. After graduating, she moved to Israel and founded Turning
Walls into Windows, which aimed to bring people
from around the world to Israel’s West Bank
so they could view the conflict from what she
describes as “a human rights–based approach.”
Sometimes entrepreneurship is born out of the
need to heal oneself. Michael Bethune T’08, who’s
worked as a minister for the past two decades,
has written two books, each a product of personal
pain. After serving in the Army in Nicaragua in
the 1980s, Bethune struggled with post-traumatic
stress disorder. He recovered, he says, thanks to “a
calling to help people every day that I have breath
and strength to do it.” That calling impelled him
to write Unto the Last of These, a book designed to
help nonprofits achieve real compassion for those
they serve.
Then last year, Bethune’s older brother
committed suicide after a period of unemployment. Through his grief, Bethune began to realize
that his brother “didn’t know how to turn that
Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Melanie Robbins; Peter Murphy; Bill Cardoni. Opposite: Courtesy of Sharnice Jones.
FAR LEFT: At Drew, Melanie Robbins
C’11 (in center of photo) co-founded
PeaceBuilders, an organization
promoting an Israeli-Palestinian
peace. LEFT: At Homeless Solutions
in Morristown, New Jersey, Betsey
Hall T’84 opened a retail shop selling
used furniture.
corner, repackage and rebrand himself.” He wrote a second book, 8
Steps to Getting Unstuck in Life, designed to help readers move past despair.
Bethune says he’s been inspired by his training at Drew, which “helped
make my faith an anchor for me in the worst moments in my life.”
It takes more than inspiration, of course, to make an impact in the
nonprofit realm. As with any entrepreneurial venture, nonprofits
require research, planning, funding and hard work. Fran Palm C’88 was
working for the Women’s Health & Counseling Center in Somerville,
New Jersey, when she realized that traditional funding streams from
donors and government sources weren’t going to be sufficient to sustain
the charity. So she turned an occasional fundraising event—what she
calls “a glorified garage sale”—into a permanent venture. She raised
$20,000 in startup capital and, in 2013, opened the Good as New thrift
shop. She had to be creative to find stock, so she established a partnership with the for-profit company Got Junk?, which agreed to donate a
percentage of the discards it picked up.
Like Palm, Betsey Hall T’84 turned to a retail model when the
Morristown-based nonprofit she headed, Homeless Solutions, needed to
find additional funding. She established Furnishing Solutions, a resale
shop, in 2013. Homeless Solutions also has built or renovated 79 affordable, eco-friendly homes, and more are planned. But Hall, who stepped
down as CEO in July, acknowledges that traditional funding sources are
not always available to nonprofit entrepreneurs. “In the for-profit world,
there are venture-capital and borrowing avenues that don’t really exist
for us,” she says.
Molly Singer C’88, whose background is in management consulting,
founded Dexterity Management in part to help nonprofits become more
entrepreneurial. “I help them move from the idea to the process to the
outcome,” she says. One of her clients, an organization that provides
housing for people with mental illness, “changed policies so much they
worked themselves out of a purpose.” She’s now helping the group
assess newer areas of need, including housing for seniors and veterans.
Singer’s experience underscores that sometimes the helpers need
some help. That was the idea behind an innovative course at Drew that
provided local nonprofits with some muchneeded business acumen. Patrick McGuinn,
an associate professor of political science,
designed the course in response to a request
from Morristown’s Interfaith Food Pantry.
Rosemary Gilmartin, the pantry’s director and
a former assistant dean of students at Drew,
wanted to get more information about the
needs of the people she served. In McGuinn’s
course, “Social Policy and Inequality in
America,” first taught last spring, students
surveyed town governments, social service
agencies, food pantries and soup kitchens to
determine the most pressing exigencies. Some
pantries, for example, couldn’t provide fresh
food because they lacked refrigeration, and
several social service agencies said their clients
couldn’t use the local pantries because they
lacked transportation.
McGuinn hopes the data will lead to new
pantries in areas of particular need. And the
class, which will likely be taught every other
year, is already changing lives: For the students,
McGuinn says, “it was an eye-opening and
transformative experience”—and perhaps a
jumping-off point for Drew’s next generation
of nonprofit entrepreneurs.     Leslie Garisto Pfaff
Teaching Success
One newly minted grad’s nonprofit aims to help young people make good decisions.
Sharnice Jones C’15 was a freshman in
high school when a guidance counselor
suggested she compete in the NAACP’s
Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and
Scientific Olympics, a yearlong program in
which high-performing students compete for
scholarship funds in one of 26 categories.
A budding singer, Jones initially entered the
competition in the vocal category. In her
junior year she tried again, this time with an
essay titled “Success before Sex.” She won
the highest award in its category.
When Jones was working on the essay,
which focused on the threat of HIV and
AIDS, she thought she could make her point
more forcefully if she interviewed someone
with the disease. She chose a young man
who told her he’d become sexually active at
12, the same age as her brother at the time.
“To think of that was very powerful for me,”
she says, “and something I wanted to help
change if I possibly could.”
As a high school senior, Jones expanded
the essay into a book, which was published
under the same title in 2012. A year later,
during her first year at Drew, she turned the
book into a nonprofit business. Through
workshops, presentations, online chats,
competitions and special events, Success
1st encourages young people from 11 to
22 to develop
­decision-­making
skills in education, dating,
leadership, and
internet, social
and personal
safety. All profits from the book go to support the organization,
which is also funded by donations. To help her spread her message, Jones put together a team of six other equally outgoing
and articulate young people.
Jones plans to study public health and hopes that one of her
younger speakers will take over the nonprofit’s helm. “I’d like to
keep the youthful perspective,” she says, “and keep sharing the
message with as many people as I can.”
Summer 2015 23