Our Town
Rutgers University–Camden has been a key ally in its host city for many years, providing myriad outreach services. A number of alumni have remained in the city, some adopting Camden as their new home in order to lend a helping hand in invaluable ways.
They came to Camden, and to Rutgers University–Camden specifically, from all directions and from a diversity of backgrounds. One was a former beat cop, still troubled by things he’d seen patrolling the city. Another arrived from Ukraine and set upon the idea of getting underserved kids into college. Still another, a Christian missionary from the other side of the Delaware River, found her calling here. One saw his student career interrupted by a stint on the streets and some hard time, an experience that made him even more determined to earn his degree and work to make Camden safer. These and other remarkable Rutgers–Camden alumni didn’t split town when they were handed their diplomas; quite the opposite. They saw the challenges of Camden as a golden opportunity to stick around and give something back—a lesson indelibly learned while attending Rutgers.
Indeed, one part of the mission of Rutgers–Camden over the years has been to provide community outreach, a calling that continues to grow and has been underscored by its new chancellor, Phoebe A. Haddon, who wants to see an invigorated commitment to partnering with the city to help where it can. A new initiative created for the benefit of Camden’s children—the Camden City College Access Network—is under development through a partnership with the Camden school district, Camden County College, and Rowan University. In December, Haddon led a contingent of representatives from the network to a conference at the White House that explored the best practices for facilitating underserved children’s access to a college education. These efforts, combined with other undertakings to strengthen communities, are increasingly yielding national attention. The Carnegie Foundation awarded Rutgers University–Camden with a 2015 Community Engagement Classification (joining Rutgers University–New Brunswick and Rutgers University–Newark). And Rutgers–Camden also has been named to the 2014 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for education and general community service.
The alumni working in Camden are mirroring these efforts, and more. Tatiana Poladko Alleyne and Atnre Alleyne created TeenSHARP (Successful in High-Achieving and Reaching Their Potential) youth leadership program, which helps urban youth from Philadelphia and Camden to start thinking about college at an early age—and preparing for it. Attorney Anthony J. Perno III, as CEO of the Cooper’s Ferry Partnership, is helping to develop far-flung neighborhoods. Michael Landis took a career break to run the Neighborhood Center, which offers the city’s most underserved residents everything from meals to summer camps.
“I work in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception kitchen, and when you see people and their whole family get a wonderful meal, and they’re very appreciative, that’s a reward,” says Joseph Benton Jr. of his volunteering. “When you help somebody who comes in and doesn’t have a coat, your day is made.”
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Jodina Hicks is the executive director of UrbanPromise.
Jodina Hicks
Keeping an ambitious promise for the city.
Jodina Hicks’s work with Camden’s UrbanPromise program is something of an encore performance for her. In the late 1980s, Hicks CLAW’02 was a student at Eastern College, a small Christian school in suburban Philadelphia, when one of the college’s better- known professors, Tony Campolo, espoused a new kind of ministry for the urban poor, to lift them out of poverty. She became an early missionary when the program, called UrbanPromise, began a summer camp and stayed to help the program expand into other areas such as job training.
After earning a degree from the School of Law–Camden, Hicks went in a different direction, tackling the massive national problem of prison reform. Her job took her to two dozen cities and gave her a fresh understanding of how badly Camden was starved for resources. “Working in Chicago, I saw a plethora of support,” she says. “I felt guilty for Camden.”
When she had a chance to return as executive director of UrbanPromise in 2010, she jumped at the opportunity. Working with founder and president Bruce Main, Hicks oversees a comprehensive program that includes a private Christian school in Camden as well as innovative offshoots like UrbanTrekkers, which gets kids outdoors—sometimes on trips as far as Utah—and Urban BoatWorks, a boat-building program that develops career skills. UrbanPromise recently opened a food co-op and meal preparation center in an abandoned church on Camden’s 36th Street. “It’s so hopeful right now,” she says. “Camden feels like it has really hit a tipping point.”
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Joseph Benton Jr. is a volunteer at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Camden.
Joseph Benton Jr.
Wrapping people up in warm clothes and lots of inspiration.
Joseph Benton Jr. is the kind of guy who will give you the shirt off his back. Now retired after a long career as a police officer and later in health care, he volunteers Wednesdays in the clothing ministry at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Camden. There, Benton UCC’72 dispenses apparel to the needy—warm coats in the dead of winter or appropriate attire for men just released from incarceration.
“We’ll have some guy who just got out of prison, and he’ll be wearing shorts on a chilly day,” says Benton, known to give a dress shirt and tie to an unemployed man going for a job interview. Benton, a fixture at the weekly clothing ministry at the Roman Catholic cathedral for years, also helps dispense lunch and occasionally dinner to Camden’s poor, and he sits on the cathedral’s community relations committee.
For Benton, the volunteer work with Camden’s indigent was inspired by his work as a patrolman. “As a policeman in Camden, I saw many tough things,” he says. He also credits his deep roots in the city for his inspiration, having grown up around the corner from Rutgers–Camden, on 10th Street. Today, he frequently calls on fellow Rutgers alumni for their help. “I’m always talking to somebody who has old T-shirts or sweatshirts to give away,” he says. “‘I’ll come to your house to get them!’”
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Atnre Alleyne, left, and Tatiana Poladko Alleyne, right, are the founders of TeenSHARP (Successful in High-Achieving and Reaching Their Potential) youth leadership program, which helps urban youth from Philadelphia and Camden.
Tatiana Poladko Alleyne and Atnre Alleyne
Pursuing the high-minded goal of higher education for all.
Tatiana Poladko Alleyne and Atnre Alleyne found two important things as Rutgers–Camden students in the mid-2000s: community activism and each other. Tatiana GSC’07, who arrived from her native Ukraine, and Atnre CCAS’06, GSC’07, who had a far-flung upbringing in England, Ghana, and southern New Jersey, were married in 2007, the year they earned master’s degrees in public administration.
Atnre and Tatiana worked analyzing crime data and volunteered with the LEAP Academy charter school, which was founded by Rutgers professor Gloria Bonilla-Santiago SSW’78. After graduating and settling in Camden, they were troubled by how few students from low-income communities were enrolled in college. They had an idea for how to fix it.
In 2009, they launched TeenSHARP (Successful in High-Achieving and Reaching Their Potential) youth leadership program, which helps urban youth from Philadelphia and Camden to start thinking about college at an early age—and preparing for it. The program, which convenes on Saturdays at Rutgers–Camden, offers instruction for both high school and middle school students, provides advice on college-prep skills, promotes activism, and even supplies transportation for kids to visit colleges in the Northeast.
“Our secret sauce is working with the parents,” says Atnre, pointing out that engaging them in the college hunt seems to spell success for the children. Now, the couple is looking to increase the size of the TeenSHARP cohort—this year it was 49 students—and expand its programs into other states, such as Delaware. For their efforts, both of them were honored with the Edward J. Bloustein Award and the Rutgers–Camden Chancellor’s Award for Alumni Civic Engagement.
“Civic engagement is a passion for us,” says Tatiana.
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Anthony J. Perno III is CEO of Cooper’s Ferry Partnership.
Anthony J. Perno III
Overseeing neighborhood redevelopment, one Camden street at a time.
Even though he grew up in a nearby southern New Jersey suburb, Anthony J. Perno III didn’t set foot in Camden until 1999, when he arrived for a job interview to become project manager for the Cooper’s Ferry Development Association, a public-private joint venture to redevelop the city’s former industrial waterfront.
Perno CLAW’05 was so intrigued by Camden and the challenges of redeveloping it that he soon moved to the city. “I found myself buying a house and living in the city within a year of my hire,” he says. “Some of the most intriguing, intelligent, and passionate people I know are my neighbors.”
He enrolled in the School of Law–Camden after realizing how much of his job involved dealing with legal issues, ranging from environmental statutes to zoning to liability matters. While a law student, Perno developed a contact list. “It’s the network of individuals whom I have come to count on professionally and personally,” he says. Perno, who was named the agency’s chief operating officer the year he earned his law degree, became CEO four years later when the organization was renamed Cooper’s Ferry Partnership and expanded its mission to develop Camden’s various neighborhoods.
Cooper’s Ferry has initiated numerous projects, from developing waterfront promenades and greenways to upgrading Camden’s aging housing. And with a drop in crime and more funds for economic development, Perno is more optimistic about the city’s future than ever. “The city is moving in the right direction,” he says.
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Bryan Morton is the founder of the North Camden Little League.
Bryan Morton
Cultivating a field of dreams for Camden’s youth.
Three years ago, Bryan Morton was pondering how to put his degree in urban studies to good use in North Camden, where he has lived all his life, when an unfortunate incident inspired him. His wife had decided to take their 3-year-old daughter to a nearby park, but she discovered it had been taken over by drug dealers.
“That was the crystallizing moment,” says Morton CCAS’10. He thought about how to reclaim Camden’s open spaces, and then he thought about the popularity of baseball in his youth. Morton had watched as the city’s ball fields were abandoned and then invaded by the narcotics trade. Now, he threw himself full time into his project: bringing Little League baseball back to North Camden.
In just three years, Morton’s vision has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The North Camden Little League has grown from 100 kids and eight volunteer coaches that first season to 450 young ballplayers, with 60 adults giving their time. He has been featured in GQ magazine and on National Public Radio.
For Morton, getting both children and their parents outdoors and working together has been the real goal. “Baseball was a convenient tool to engage parents and children in a community that had seen parents and children isolate themselves around fears about public safety.”
Few have a better understanding of the lure of crime on Camden’s postindustrial streets than Morton, who whipsawed between two worlds as a young adult. He’d dropped out of school in ninth grade, then earned a GED, and enrolled in Rutgers–Camden in 1990, only to find himself back on the streets and eventually in prison for drug dealing and armed robbery. Overcoming that rugged start to finally earn his degree in 2010 has driven his passion to make the city better. The league thus far has revitalized four parks in North Camden. “We’re giving people an opportunity to feel pride,” he says.
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Michael Landis is the executive director of the Neighborhood Center in Camden.
Michael Landis
Making the people of the city the center of his attention.
The first time that Michael Landis set eyes on the Neighborhood Center, which bills itself as a kind of “community living room” for Camden’s low-income residents, was in 1988. Landis CCAS’83, then a rising executive with Shared Medical Systems, swung by to donate food from his church in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Then, he kept coming back—as a volunteer, then a board member, and finally as the center’s executive director, deciding three years ago to shelve his corporate career.
Landis says that he feels compelled to tackle what he sees as his biggest challenge: “convincing people that a life in poverty should not be the destiny of a child just because he or she was born in Camden.”
Landis’s activism traces back to his first stint in the city, as an involved history major at Rutgers–Camden in the early 1980s, serving as vice president of the student government and news editor of the Gleaner. The skills he developed have been a huge help in running the 101-year-old Neighborhood Center, which operates summer camps, after-school sessions, art classes, and a kitchen to help Camden’s underserved children and, increasingly, their parents.
Landis, like others involved in Camden’s civic life, says he’s optimistic about the recent drop in crime but still concerned about the lack of jobs. He takes great solace, however, in every step forward. “Recently, our teen director took students in our teen program on the road for college visits,” he says. “I behaved like a proud, and nervous, dad.” •
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