18 April 2007
Project People Foundation
The Hon. Rev. Linda Tarry-Chard
490 Riverside Drive
New York, NY 10027

Dear Rev. Tarry-Chard,

The relationship between Project People Foundation and South Africa began over 11 years ago in 1995 with the Black Doll Project. Over 15,000 dolls were sent to SA in a single year and were distributed to children in the townships who had never seen dolls in their likeness before.

Project People Foundation is dedicated to changing lives on the African and American continent and the Celebrating Life: Concert Series is a way for the foundation to make this possible. The foundation has touched the lives of South Africans, old and young alike in so many ways. We are grateful for their continued work in South Africa and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Project People Foundation on the work it has embarked on in South Africa.

Thank you for reaching out to people in South Africa with the many projects that the Project People Foundation has undertaken. IT is through the support of organizations such as The Project People Foundation that South Africa will secure its future and development.

The Project People Foundation truly represents the principles of Batho Pele (creating a better life for all South Africans and putting people first.)

I wish to thank you for your support and friendship.

Yours Sincerely,

FIKILE MAGUBANE

CONSUL GENERAL

Howard Goodman
Palm Beach columnist

April 24, 2007

Voices soared, the piano jumped and 500 people swayed and clapped their hands.

It was a great afternoon in church.

There were whites and blacks, old people and young, Jews and Christians across denominations and one brave teenager from South Africa.

It was a concert, a prayer meeting, a fundraiser and a call for citizen action.

The event was called “Celebrating Life,” and it brought together lots of people who wouldn’t normally celebrate together.

“You had the lady from Palm Beach talking to the lady next to her, from Riviera Beach,” said the Rev. Linda Tarry-Chard, who created both the event and the foundation it benefited, “sitting in front of the lady from Singer Island, in back of the guy from Boynton Beach.”

The Florida Atlantic University Gospel Choir sang along with Ann Turnoff, a cantor from Boca Raton, and Diana Solomon-Glover, lead soloist at The Riverside Church in New York City.

They shook the Cason United Methodist Church in Delray Beach, a mostly white church with a black female pastor, the Rev. Sharon Austin, as if to straddle Swinton Avenue, the historic color line when Delray was a segregated city.

Back in January, Cason United Methodist was scarred by a vandal who rearranged the letters of the church marquee into a repulsive racist epithet.

But Sunday, the church showed off our better angels.

“We take people of goodwill, people who want to make this world a better place, people who are hopeful in spirit,” Tarry-Chard said, “and we create a bridge so they can connect with people who have the same feeling but are at an economic disadvantage in South Africa.”

Tarry-Chard spends most of her time in New York as a minister at The Riverside Church. She also is a part-time resident of Delray Beach. Which gives you some idea of her energy. (Full disclosure: She and her husband, Jim Chard, are friends of mine.)

In 1995, she founded the Project People Foundation to aid the Republic of South Africa, newly freed of apartheid but still beset by poverty and poor education. And increasingly, by AIDS.

Her idea was to find ways to help women and children of South Africa. Her talent is to come up with human-scale projects that make the participants feel as if they’re actually accomplishing something. An early effort, for example, involved sending 15,000 black dolls to South African children who had never seen dolls in their likeness.

Currently, her foundation is helping thousands of South African children get into primary school while training women to be entrepreneurs — all in the same elegant project.

They’re teaching and employing women in Johannesburg to make school uniforms to donate to local township children. Some 500,000 South African children miss school because their families can’t afford the uniforms — a hand-me-down requirement from colonial days. The women trained in sewing also do jobs for pay. That’s a big deal in a country where 57 percent of black women are unemployed.

Another nifty project uses computer videoconferencing technology to link American adults with African children.

One such American, a New Yorker named Andrea DuBois, has built a relationship with 16-year-old Manini Joyce Mkhabela, orphaned when her mother died five years ago of AIDS. With DuBois’ support, Mkhabela is going to school and has a chance at a future.

On Sunday, on her first trip to America, she was up on the pulpit of Cason United Methodist and reading a poem she’d written.

The poem acknowledges the “cruel, selfish devil” of death. And yet concludes:

Let’s all celebrate life.

She finished to an ovation. I clapped and rose to my feet along with everyone else.

We were clapping for her. And we were clapping for the idea that any one of us can make a difference.

We just have to do it.

The Project People Foundation can be reached at www.projectpeoplefoundation.org or 212-870-6702.

Howard Goodman can be reached at hgoodman@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6638.

Copyright © 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

PROJECT PEOPLE FOUNDATION launches Celebrating Life: Concert Series, a benefit to aid the women, children and youth in South Africa’s townships and build bridges across multi-cultural communities in the USA

Download the Press Release: Celebrating Life Inaugural Concert 
 

The Celebrating Life Concert Series is an invitation for you to make a difference in the lives of women, children, and youth in the townships of South Africa and to celebrate someone who has open a door of opportunity for you.  The featured artist will be Diana Solomon-Glover from The Riverside Church in New York City.  Please join us on April 22, 2007 at 3:00 PM at the Cason United Methodist Church. 

Click here to see a map.

View the Invitation to the Concert