Community Foundation for Nantucket Spring 2011

Community Foundation for Nantucket

Spring 2011

Connecting People Who Care •CFNan Update

To connect people who care with causes that matter to them by providing simple, powerful and creative ways to give back to the community to help ensure Nantucket’s vitality now and forever.

• Nantucket Community Music Center

Photo: Kris Kinsley Hancock

We decided that spring on Nantucket would be the perfect time to launch this inaugural edition of a newsletter from the Community Foundation for Nantucket (CFNan).

Despite this year’s lingering winter on the Island, last December’s grants from CFNan have lifted the spirits and minds of Nantucketers through the winter and beyond.

Thanks to the generosity of the ’Sconset Chapel Outreach Fund, Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank and a number of individual donors, 18 local nonprofits were awarded Discretionary Grants from CFNan for a total of over $34,000. We are highlighting some of the programs we were able to support in this newsletter.

You’ll read about more than 70 Island youths who sent music drifting through the halls of Nantucket Elementary School and many more who heard the glorious sounds of the Boston Symphony Orchestra floating through Symphony Hall in Boston. You’ll learn about the satisfied smiles of children with disabilities who created colorful works of art under the tutelage of accomplished Nantucket artists. And you’ll see the fascinating, lifelike devices that are helping to train Nantucket Cottage Hospital medical staff in the safe delivery of babies.

And all served our mission:

• Nantucket Sports & Therapeutic Accessible Recreation (STAR)

• Nantucket Cottage Hospital obstetrics education staff

INSIDE

STAR Artists Always-Safe Birth Music in the Air

• Nantucket Community Music Center

www.cfnan.org 508–825–9993 P.O. Box 204 Nantucket, MA 02554

STAR Artists •Sensory Art

You could see the delight on the faces of Nantucket’s STAR children during four special sessions in January.

In collaboration between Nantucket Sports & Therapeutic Accessible Recreation (STAR) and the Artists Association of Nantucket, eight children aged four to ten years practiced the art of creativity while learning the art of socializing.

With a grant from the Community Foundation for Nantucket, STAR brought children with challenges and disabilities together with their peers and siblings to tackle colorful hands-on projects during four “Sensory Art Class” gatherings under the direction of AAN instructor John Carruthers.

Three tables, with three projects using different materials, gave the children valuable A young student finds creative delight in sensory input and helped to teach them a therapeutic Sensory Art classes. “transitions,” said STAR Director Tina Steadman. By integrating peers and siblings with the STAR group, the children learned important socializing skills in a supportive environment, explained Steadman.

STAR’s mission focuses mainly on allowing children with disabilities to take part in sports and other activities in safe and supportive learning environments or during play activities. Co-mingling their youth participants with others is a common practice at STAR, whether it’s during mixed classes of kids in art classes, in their ice skating gatherings at Nantucket Ice or in swimming classes at Nantucket Community Pool.

Steadman noted that when STAR surveyed its children’s parents, art therapy classes were among the leading activities they wanted for their children. “It opened all sorts of artistic possibilities to her that wouldn’t otherwise have been available,” said Kris Kinsley Hancock of the participation by her six-year-old daughter.

The grant was the third for STAR from the Community Foundation for Nantucket.

Previous CFNan awards to STAR were used for programs in adaptive swimming and at SeaPony Farm for equine assisted activities.

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STAR supports its activities through donations, grants and fundraising events. To learn more about the program, see nantucketstar.com. For more on AAN classes and exhibitions, visit Artists Association of Nantucket at nantucketarts.org.

2010 Discretionary Grant Recipients

A Safe Place Alzheimers Services of Cape & Islands Big Brothers Big Sisters on Nantucket Inky Santa’s Toy Drive Nantucket AIDS Network Nantucket Atheneum Literacy Program Nantucket Center for Elder Affairs Nantucket Community Music Center Nantucket Community School Nantucket Cottage Hospital Foundation Nantucket EmergencyFood Pantry Nantucket Family Planning Nantucket Ice Company, Inc. Nantucket Rental Assistance Program Nantucket Sports Therapeutic Accessible Recreation (STAR) SeaPony Farm Small Friends on Nantucket Sustainable Nantucket

For more about current CFNan grant recipients, see cfnan.org/CurrentGrants.php

Always-Safe Birth •Simulated birth

Her name is Noelle, and thanks to a grant from the Community Foundation for Nantucket, she and her newborn daughter Eleanor are now members of the Nantucket Cottage Hospital obstetrics education staff.

You won’t hear news of Noelle’s “hiring” or see Eleanor’s birth announcement in the local paper.

Both Noelle and Eleanor, along with a second “baby,” are elements of a new high-tech teaching apparatus composed of a plasticized, life-sized pregnant female and her “newborn” baby.

An additional neonatal model simulates an infant in the first 28 days of its life and can recreate cyanotic symptoms including the skin turning blue.

Designed to provide a complete birthing experience before, during and after delivery, the Noelle™ package of simulators by Gaumard Scientific Co. includes a full-size articulating female manikin, an articulating birthing baby with placenta and one resuscitation baby.

Anatomically accurate parts with the package include umbilical cords and three dilating cervices.

Using an electrically powered hydraulic mechanism, the newborn baby model passes through the mother’s birth canal, imitating a real-life delivery. These amazingly lifelike models are designed to help hospital staff learn the birthing process in a safe and repeatable way.

Birthing problems including breech births and umbilical cords entwined around the baby can be recreated.

“We’re happy to have Noelle as part of our OB education,” said Dr. Margaret Koehm, who noted that she has already delivered a couple hundred babies at Nantucket Cottage Hospital since she arrived here as a family practitioner in the summer of 2009.

“Being a hospital thirty miles at sea, we need to be ready for any kind of obstetric emergency, and Noelle should help keep us prepared,” said Koehm.

CFNan granted the monies to purchase the birthing simulator after an appeal from Dr. Koehm and Nantucket Cottage Hospital Foundation. The hospital plans to use the apparatus to ensure standardized procedures in its OB department, according to its grant request.

NCH Nurse Sarah Wright suggested the name Eleanor for the previously unnamed newborn.

According to OB Nurse Manager Nancy Lucchini, most of the hospital medical staff has already seen the full model kit, which arrived in mid March.

For more on Nantucket Cottage Hospital, its birthing unit and other services, visit nantuckethospital.org.

Dr. Mimi Koehm and Dr. George Butterworth examine Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s new birthing simulator.

For more information on how to become a Friend of the Foundation, or to create your own Giving Fund to support Nantucket, visit our website at cfnan.org/GettingStarted.php.

Newsletter Writer-Editor William Ferrall

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Community Foundation for Nantucket

Nonprofit Org U.S. Postage PAID Nantucket MA Permit #553

For now, forever, for Nantucket.

P. O. Box 204

Nantucket, MA 02554

Board of Trustees Officers Peggy Gifford C HAIRMAN Phillip F. Stambaugh P RESIDENT Robert Dean Felch V ICE P RESIDENT John Penrose V ICE P RESIDENT Michael Varbalow T REASURER Ann Colgrove S ECRETARY Trustees Ann Colgrove Robert Dean Felch William H. Frist, M.D. Peggy Gifford Joe Hale Tom Maggs Eileen P. McGrath Marsha Reis Kotalac Susan Chase Ottison John Penrose Phillip F. Stambaugh Michael Varbalow, Esq. Advisory Committee Dan Drake Wade Greene Reginald Levine The Rev. Eugene McDowell Alison Monaghan Richard Oman Lynn Petrasch Clarissa Porter Mimi Young

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Margaretta S. Andrews E XECUTIVE D IRECTOR

Music in the air •Beautiful notes

With help from the Community Foundation for Nantucket, more than 70 Nantucket youths sent melodies aloft and heard the glorious sounds of world-renowned musicians this past school year. The CFNan grant to Nantucket Community Music Center allowed the group to create two programs that embraced participation by children from both public and private schools on Nantucket.

No classes are held on Wednesday afternoons at the Elementary School to allow for teachers’ professional development. With a grant from CFNan, NCMC developed a musical program where 15 students attended each of two eightweek winter and spring sessions to learn the fundamentals of stringed instruments in lessons taught by well experienced teachers from NCMC. Musical instruction included NCMC Artistic Director Mollie Glazer teaching the cello, Caleb Cressman teaching the ukulele, and guitar lessons

by Jason Sullivan. With the grant covering most of the program costs, each child paid just $6–$7 for the hour-long lesson, compared to a usual cost of $25–$30 per half hour.

An NES student tackles the cello during music lessons funded by CFNan

In addition to the teaching sessions, the NCMC grant from CFNan funded an offisland excursion for a larger group of elementary and middle school students.

In mid-February, the budding musicians from the lessons classes, along with children from the Island’s private schools, heard the rich crescendos of the Boston Symphony Orchestra lofted through Boston’s magnificent Symphony Hall. A bus full of 45 Nantucket youths and chaperones traveled to Boston for a performance of the BSO’s Youth and Family Concerts, led by Thomas Wilkins. The concerts, entitled “Community Pride: A Musical Look at Cooperation, Communication, and Conviction,” featured music of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Delibes, Dvorák and Rimsky-Korsakov.

The trip was the largest ever for NCMC, according to Oliver, and many of the children had never before visited Symphony Hall.

For more on Nantucket Community Music Center and their programs, lessons and concerts, visit nantucketcommunitymusiccenter.org or call 508–228–3352.