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Press Releases
Project K.I.D.
Manhattan Institute gives national award, $10,000 contribution to Project K.I.D.
Monday, January 01, 2007
By MIKE PERRY Staff ReporterFAIRHOPE -- In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Paige Ellison-Smith left her Fairhope home and immediately departed for the devastated Gulf Coast.
In Waveland, Miss., she found scores of little children wandering alone along the roadside. An apartment complex managed by her friend had been reduced to pile of splintered wood. And a mother and her two daughters clung to their small apartment as dead bodies were being pulled from the wreckage, Ellison-Smith said.
Across the hurricane-battered coast, parents were scrambling to find order in chaos as their children played unsupervised amidst debris and floodwaters, she said.
"I kept saying, 'How do these people survive?'" said Ellison-Smith, a former trainer of child-care workers for the U.S. military. "I knew they needed a safe haven that was focused on kids, and the parents probably needed to be held safe. They all just needed to be held."
Within a week of the storm, Ellison-Smith, 45, networked with local agencies and organized volunteers in recovering communities across the Alabama and Mississippi Gulf Coasts.
Together, the teams created temporary "Play Care" facilities to provide recreation and entertainment for children in those broken communities. And thus, Project K.I.D. -- Kids in Devastation -- was born.
Her hard work did not go unrecognized.
The Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank that fosters humanitarian ideas, recently selected Ellison-Smith for its 2006 Social Entrepreneurship Award and gave $10,000 toward her cause. The award honors nonprofit leaders who develop innovative solutions to the nation's most pressing social problems with little to no government financial support.
Ellison-Smith received the award last month during a ceremony at the Harvard University Club in New York City.
"Americans are sadly familiar with the failed response that followed Hurricane Katrina," said Clarice Smith, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan Institute. "Six days (after the storm), Ms. Ellison-Smith set up the first 'Play Care' site to give children a protective and restorative environment where they could play and laugh again."
During a recent interview at her home, Ellison-Smith described how the small grassroots recovery effort is now growing into a national model for restoring hope to children in devastated areas.
After visiting Waveland, Ellison-Smith teamed up with another friend, Lenore Ealy, and within a week of the hurricane, the pair formed the first "Play Care" facility in Bayou La Batre. They soon took the concept to other hurricane-battered cities in Mississippi, taking toys and art supplies to disaster recovery centers in Moss Point, Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Gulfport, Picayune and Jackson.
Demand for the organization's services boomed in the months following the hurricane, Ellison-Smith said. She sold her house to finance the program's growth and quit her pharmaceutical sales job at GlaxoSmithKline to devote herself full time to Project K.I.D.
Then came news of the award from the Manhattan Institute.
But demand for the program along the Gulf Coast began to fade as the region slowly recovered from Katrina. Ellison-Smith and Ealy knew there was a national need for Project K.I.D., so they developed a framework for teaching local agencies to replicate their ideas in other devastated communities.
The pair contacted one of Ellison-Smith's former military colleagues, Linda Smith, who was then working for the National Association for Child Care Resources and Referral in Washington, D.C. The colleague gave Ellison-Smith a job with the national agency, which works with more than 800 state and local agencies to provide children with quality, affordable child care.
Ellison-Smith also has partnered with the New York Says Thank You Foundation, a Sept. 11, 2001-affiliated charity, to raise money for a mobile response unit for children in devastated areas.
And in April, Project K.I.D. officials plan to host a consortium in Washington, D.C., where they will launch their national framework for helping kids in devastation.
Ellison-Smith said she hopes people will donate money to Project K.I.D. to help the program reach the national level. Children across America need a safe harbor when disaster strikes, and Project K.I.D. is the vehicle for delivering it, she said.
"We need to look at how to respond to all disasters in this country," Ellison-Smith said. "Our children especially need our help, because they are our future."
ON THE NET To learn more, visit www.project-kid.org.