hi everyone it's good to see you it's fine it is good to see you and thank you for joining us on managing your world i'm your host ever afraid your welcome to our program the goal of our program is to bring timely and relevant information on wealth management topics to you our audience and to interview guests who can help in part knowledge that will help you make better and more informed decisions around managing your well our topic for discussion today is being relevant and here to help  coming so we want to discuss today what it means to be relevant and webster disc describes are defined relevant as being closely connected are appropriate to the matter at hand and so of course that term could apply to almost any situation in life but today we we want to focus on how relevancy pertains to nonprofit organizations and the corporations that they help expand the services that they offered to the individuals and the families they serve and we like to invite conny and to talk about home front because home front is a tackling one of the toughest social issues in our society which of course is the issue of homelessness so kind of we're very happy to have you here so tell us a little about yourself and what led you to create how or what made to envision rating an organization like home front i had no plans to create an organization like a long time ago it's twenty five years now a friend of mine a paediatrician took me out of my office one day i was a  headhunter and he said carney you need to come with me and see what's happening in your community and he took me from my fancy office out to the grim motels that lined the route one corridor and what i saw horrified me there were hungry homeless kids in these motel rooms with their moms they were in rooms where there was no place to heat a baby's bottle there was no place to prepare dinner was no place to think a private thought absolutely no place to do homework or to play oh and we went to six different motels there were over three hundred homeless families at that point that were warehoused in those grim motel rooms along the route one corridor and at the end of the day my friend  to me and said connie there are hungry homeless people in your community fix it and i only took up the challenge because i really believe that in this very giving wealthy community as soon as folks knew that there were homeless kids it would be fixed but i don't think so twenty five years later but there are no more very proud to say there are no more children that are warehoused in forgotten in those awful motel rooms we now have ways to help families move on from homelessness and every flex the mission of home front right absolutely is to help people through by the immediate horror of homelessness but most importantly to break the cycle of poverty and to give the kids a chance at a good and dignified future and that's why we turn so often to the community  into that in just a moment so it's a good time thank you kind is a good time to introduce wait so wade martin is an executive director in wealth management and is senior portfolio management director at morgan stanley way to some member of the martin rizzo group and he specializes in helping clients with structured settlements with special needs trusts land preservation techniques and personalized client service so wait tell us a little about your team i know you work with a great team the martin result group tell systematic solution and that's the way we approach clients funds and their lives and it's not about the money it's more about the quality of life of our clients and friends and that's what attracted us to the county and home front because what she's doing is invaluable and we just really are proud to help cannae and when people say what do you do i say whatever county asked me to do i know you not only help conny you're quite involved in the community i'll just mention a couple other organizations that you help the american farm and trust and of course the d n r greenway trust as well as home front and certainly i could go on and on i know you're involved with the community so this is really glad good to have you now that's such a big question the very nature of our work i could argue that giving someone a food back to help them survive to the next day their family survive is relevant but what's  important is not getting them the food but really teaching them how to get the food for themselves and how to cook it up it's really that all give a man a fish and teach him to fish and we're very committed to that but that's a very difficult task and that's why we need the community to come in and teach the skills that will make it so that folks can get a job so that they can take care of their children are more and more we're seeing children with horrific issues but yes oh today at my shelter i have a child with cancer i have another one who's  crippled with cerebral palsy i have three that have been labelled as autistic so were three of those nigeria's help train someone to get a job you're dealing with really big issue s later on today will be working with a mom who has stage four cancer who has four kids and no relatives to help to figure out a plan ok well you can just move on when you hear things you mentioned before there i want to talk a lot about how do you partner with corporations to do some of the things you do and i believe for folks who are struggling there are food banks but there aren't any diaper banks places where young families who have a baby or tweens can get help with diapers and  we used to see horrific caper cases of diaper rash where baby's diapers were not changed when they needed to be changed but were changed based on how many diapers were left i let one wa i said maybe diapers we don't i don't have to ration them out and all of a sudden diapers appeared wade went to his group of friends and said make it happen and i just still don't know how the hell you pulled it off it's one thing about comedy and home front and every charity attorneys want checks but my friends my clients they want to do something so when tony said she needed diapers literally we sent out a text and which blew me away about two weeks ago we were down meeting with kani and they took us into their food bank and the shelves are empty empty and they didn't really know how they were to do the next distribution and i brought my father and my wife with me and we were just horrified and next thing you know all of our friends are chopped right buying ten boxes of cereal and and canned chicken and you name it and now we have a pipeline everybody's aware you talk about being relevant everybody's aware what homefront needs and that's why i was so happy to come today with ali because we need to get her word out the community and other charities it's it's about a check but it's also about making people that are giving feel good and giving them a purpose so we're trying to connect to we give out food to about fourteen hundred families amount and for twenty years now our issue has always been july and august when the churches go away when the school groups go away that traditionally give us the food we get desperate and we turn to our friends our friends who care people who want to be relevant people who want to make a difference i had heard that before that when you're helping on the community the summer months are really tough because people go away on vacation but your family's in need their negroes on it doesn't take a summer and it brought the smiles and the connection between morgan stanley employees and the kids was just invaluable we have a summer camp that servers between ninety and one hundred  kids every day of the summer where in the morning we do academics with certified teachers and then in the afternoons we make such sure fun things happen with the kids and we need the corporate community to help us make sure that happens but i don't know that we've ever had a wednesday like the day when morgan stanley showed up with their video trucks and their ice cream truck and  my next question then when as county do you partner with other corporations and give me examples all around and what what you do with them oh new jersey manufacturers they started by giving us soup from their cafeteria on fridays but now their corporate folks do everything from tutoring our kids coming over to read to our babies during their lunch breaks to being major major  underwriters of our new campus so many of the local corporations are giving caring for bank of america has been particularly wonderful in the area mathematica policy research the folks from there run our basketball team i will our winning basketball team i will i will add  and that's very special for a group of homeless kids who don't normally get to participate in sports right to be able to actually have the experience of being on a team being on it in learning all the skills that you need to learn in order to win it's not that they  good athletes but having the and just the conversation that they're going to have with people that they're interacting with it could change their life with a sentence you just don't know last year we had over fifty thousand donated hours which makes it so that we can do our work so tell us about your new facility i will in a minute but i do i just just want to point out that as thrilled as we are to have the communities the corporations the business communities time and talent with us the thing that's probably most important is to have the larger community do two things one is that they give the message directly to our clients that they're not forgotten that they matter and that a whole bunch of people are betting on them to succeed that's really important but the second piece great significance is when the larger community comes and sees that our families aren't bad they're only poor when they see that their mothers love their kids just as they do and want what's only good for them then they become a powerful voice for our families then they become advocates then they tell their legislators no it's not ok to balance the budget on the back of the poorest of the four so it matters that the corporations and the businesses the folks with standing in the community get involved with our families so how would you let them know more me and i know you do a lot of africa three but how do you look at corporations and the community how do you make them more aware of what your needs are and how they can help  managing volunteers as a particular art and that also takes infrastructure so we do the very best we can but at this point frankly there's so many there are a lot of calls coming in the door and but  then when a call comes in we're able to make sure that a company a small group of folks has a meaningful experience because there's so much work to be done and you manage what over twelve hundred volunteers i think i read or yeah yeah yeah and used in the more two hundred active volunteers absolutely helping a family move from homelessness to independence is a very big task and we need all hands on he took the bull by the horns and she's acting down voluntary as a nurse because she's a nurse and literally putting everything she has into it talking over friends about it and that makes a huge difference in energy money and of the amazing but yes she's a nurse has recruited huge resources medical resources and who said my god these folks don't exercise i know how to exercise and she leaves regular exercise classes that are that's very that are engaging for our clients and for our moms and for our kids and the kids you know our dads haven't gotten involved yet but we always want to we want to make sure that happen we're always last to the back so county when you will come back to the facility in a moment but when you approach corporations versus individuals when you want to see donations is there a difference and  what are some of the differences oh often corporate large corporations at this point have very formalized process these for me for asking for  things but usually you have to write a grant and go through that process and then i say slower everything down for you it slows it up dramatically but we have found people from the corporation come out see our kids work with our kids care about our kids they somehow make the process go much smoother i'm not sure exactly how they go back but they go back and somehow get our our proposal to the top of the list that's great and with individuals oh well we ask for support from individuals  i used to do a lot of talk and i don't talk very much anymore i just bring them through to see our campus to see our families to see the lives that they can choose to change to help get better and are our clients do  and my clients just walking through the hall and we would sit randomly chosen saying how has this place mattered to you would give such strong testimonials would say changed my life it gave me back my voice made it so that i feel i can now care for my babies and do a good job i didn't have to say anything else making a difference and how he's been to our lunches that we host was twenty or twenty two nonprofits in a room together because i think it's very important to work not profit working with other non profits and it's really not a competition it's more of a collaboration and so out of that has come a lot of really neat things the rotary just finished building a playground on a new campus and we try to teach people to fish it ways to donate funds and my mother passed in april and it's in lieu of flowers we had all the donations go to the home front and a lot of our clients that have charities that they like are causes that they like we try to tell them the flowers are wonderful but they die if you're able to have friends and family that cared about the one that passed wanted we do this and literally in the last three or four months we've had people that have been at that watches nonprofits that have begun to donations for folks that have passed away and it really makes everybody feel good and it makes a lot of money for the foundations and for that the charities so it's just it's being relevant in a really smart efficient way so how did children would have a playground because they didn't have a black ground he was a rotarian and he went to his rotary group and said we need to help but he wasn't content to do that he wanted to maximize the impact so he went to all the roads to wreak rotary clubs in central jersey and said we need to band together so that our money really has some impact and then he leveraged it up the road or rotary chain so there  some international rotary money in the playground of mercer county i want to wonderful message that gives to our children there are people in the community to care who want you to make  it another great example of that would be coming from that lunch would be the princeton breast cancer center was losing their housing in the y m c a and linda me from vienna green why has this lovely campus and how to house so now the prince and breast cancer center is over a dinner greenway and cancer survivors are writing pink bikes around preserve land and when you see that when people point to see that it doesn't get any better than that you know seeing  that when we had the green becoming for the the playground to see those kids and the smiles on their faces it was absolutely priceless i mean it just made it all worthwhile how did you come up with that get i like everybody talking i like everybody one room my father and myself we don't like any waste we like nobody is fishing as possible so she has a room that they can teach art and something needs are always talks about doing well by doing good so i just to point out that for businesses that give back in the community there is a real important payback for them because their staff gets energized their staff want to work for a company that  committed in the community that is relevant in the community and so as that as albert says they are competing for the best and the brightest lawyers and it matters when they're recruiting lawyers to be able to say hey this is what we do this is what our company stands for and i know is and it's a tremendous focus and morgan stanley i was so there you know there always kinds i know you just built that end and i want you especially to tell us about the thing matching gift that you received well it's just about a year today where we had our grand opening we had had a vision that put in all the services together in one spot so that the domestic violence services the mental health services the addiction services the day care and the life in richm the job training on the job training and the helping folks get their high school equivalency is learning how to read that it would matter for all in one place but we weren't sure that it would work well i'm very happy to report great now that it's made a huge difference and our families are really recovering from homelessness and figuring out how to change their lives and move take weapons and make them into plowshares you know yet so whereas we look at it it's right near the airport on the corner of scotch road in ninety five and it's a very happy place i know that sounds like a strange thing to people going about thinking oh yeah it'll change your life so one close in common you like to say about relevancy being relevant i'm just really happy to be here today with current and try to spread the word of home from another nonprofit to try to community ever again has to live in an abandoned building or in a car and that all kids have a shot at a good in dignified future and they all deserve