My Nonprofit Reviews

A Palo Alto teacher goes to Haiti after the earthquake and at the request of a local leader starts a school do illiterate boys and girls who had no access to education.

100% of the students Who took the 6th grade Haitian National Matriculation exam passed and are now in middle school.

See Www.greatergoodhaiti.org.

Symphony Parnassus was founded in 1989 as the UCSF “Doctors” Orchestra. It has had three musical directors: Founding director Jonathan Davis (1989-1994), Jeremy Swirling (1994-1997) and Stephen Paulson (1998-present).

In 1999, the orchestra was reorganized as a non-profit and renamed Symphony Parnassus. While Symphony Parnassus continues to attract a number of UCSF-affiliated musicians, increasingly its membership draws from non-UCSF musicians.

The orchestra rehearses weekly at San Francisco’s School of the Arts. Symphony Parnassus performs four concerts programs a season – all in San Francisco:

2014-15 Season Highlights
• Mahler: Symphony No. 1
• Local composer Eleanor Armer: The Great Instrument of the Geggetets
• Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 1, Jeremy Tai, soloist
• Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 2, Alina Kobialka, soloist
• 25th Anniversary Concert: June 2,

2013-2014 Season Highlights
• Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring - involved 100 musicians and attracted our biggest audience to date: 800 (400 comps to veterans and music students. Concert dedicated to the veterans.).
• Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 22, Helene Wickett, soloist
• Bloch: Schelomo Jewish Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, E. Oliver Herbert, soloist
• Martin: Violin Concerto, Stuart Canin, soloist. Mr. Canin is the former concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony.
• Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite

2012-2013 Season Highlights
• Glazunov: Violin Concerto, Hannah Tarley, soloist
• Chausson: Poeme, Noemy Gagnon-LaFrenais, violin soloist
• Karpman: “Take 4” for Four Woodwinds and Strings – West Coast premiere
• Sibelius: Violin Concerto, Alina Ming Kobialka, soloist
• Janacek: Sinfonietta – This obscure piece was a tough sell for our audience and we had low attendance.

for more information and tickets for its forthcoming concerts go to WWW. SymphonyParnassus.org

The Fistula Foundation funds reconstructive surgery for some of the most down-trodden women in the world. Often excluded from their homes, families and villages because they were raped or forced into early marriages, bearing children when their bodies are not ready for this, their birth canals are ripped apart when the rape occurs or the child is born and they become incontinent and worse. They are in pain, face ostracism, etc.

Doctors and other medical workers are trained by the Fistula Foundation to do surgery which has been needed in the USA since the Spanish Civil War. TFF has now set up in countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Afghanistan ... places where abject poverty and lack of education affect women disproportionately.

The clinics that have been set up become centers for education and retraining for the women and their children who stay and heal, learn and thrive, become trained and become active members of society instead of rejected miserable people who die from starvation or worse.

I understand that for $450 you can not only save the life of a woman but put her back on her feet with dignity and success. Seems a small price to pay.

I am a donor to the Fistula Foundation because its mission is to help women who have been ravaged by rape, forced marriages or preteen marriages which result in outrage to their bodies by men who don't care. Women are chattel and Fistula Foundation returns these seriously injured women to sustainable, valuable and valued positions in a society which had shunned them or killed them.

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