50 unsung New York heroes
Published: November 23, 2006
Back to the community
Volunteering more than 40 hours each month, Tasha Y. Jelks has established herself as an extraordinary community leader in New York. She works an average 45 hours a week for Ernst & Young’s NYC office, and despite her chaotic schedule that balances work, travel and family, she finds time to make a difference. Jelks holds an executive position for two charitable organizations - first, she is the financial secretary of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. She is also a four-year member and Neptune-area chairperson for the Monmouth County Cotillion, working to provide scholarships and social responsibility programs for area high school students. As an active participant in her daughter’s school, Jelks helps out in various fund-raisers, organizations and sporting events. Additionally, she is a supporting member of the March of Dimes and participates annually in WalkAmerica. Jelks, 32, says that “giving back to the community in which you grew up is like paying a debt that will possibly never be repaid.”
Brood awakening
While most 65-year-olds look forward to retiring, Marilyn Sermon, of Flushing, is single-handedly raising her six grandchildren. Ryan, 17, Dorian, 12, Dominique, 10, Arielle, 9, Tyler, 5, and Davin, 4, were adopted by their devoted grandmother after their mother lost custody. “If you or a family member don’t adopt, then they put them up and anyone could take them,” says Marilyn. “So I had to adopt them.” She has no surviving family to help out, but her neighbors lend a hand picking up the little ones at the bus stop or going to the store. “At one time I was dealing with five different schools,” she said. “I got the PTA meetings all mixed up!”
It’s a daunting task caring for six kids at any age, but Sermon does right by hers. “We sit down to dinner every night. It’s a must,” she said. She buys groceries in bulk from BJ’s and doles out chores around the house. She still finds the time for family bowling nights at Jib Lanes and trips to the Bronx Zoo. “I just do what it is that I have to do, and the Lord has been with me to give me the strength,” she says. “The main thing is to make sure they finish school and are decent human beings.”
Heals on wheels
Growing up on the Ho-Chunk Nation (aka Winnebago) reservation in Wisconsin, Alec Thundercloud watched his ailing grandmother be disrespected by a hostile off-reservation doctor. “I saw the way my grandmother was treated, which to me was very shocking,” says the 36-year-old Manhattanite, who is the medical director of the Mobile Health Long Island program for the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. That motivated him to attend med school at the University of Minnesota, and now he provides free health care daily to Long Island kids without insurance. His mobile van, one of the Children’s Health Fund’s 21 nationwide, is a full-service doctor’s office on wheels, giving full physicals, screenings, lab workups, immunizations and more. He also gets uninsured patients enrolled in Child Health Plus - and most choose Thundercloud as their primary pediatrician. “As long as they’re able to access health care,” he says, “we feel like we’ve done our job.”
Running for his sister’s life
Daniel Giblin, 44, of Rochester, began running a mile a night in 1999 to lose weight and become an active dad. He’s completed 20 marathons and one Ironman triathlon since then, but this year’s New York City Marathon ran deeper because he did it for his big sister, Sheila Kahl, who’s been on New York Presbyterian Hospital’s waiting list 17 months for a double-lung transplant. “I train in the morning [5 a.m.] and it gets hard this time of year because it’s dark and it’s cold,” Giblin says. “I just think of my sister, Sheila. She would do anything to be able to get out of bed and run six to eight miles. So that’s my motivation.” Giblin, Rochester’s deputy sheriff, has so far raised $85,000 of the $100,000 operation needed to replace Sheila’s lungs, which were scarred from the radiation treatment she received battling breast cancer in the early ’90s. (Donations can be made by visiting www.transplants.org and looking up Sheila Kahl.) “She said her dream is to some day come down and watch me run a marathon, even walk a 5K with me,” he says. “I really, really hope that happens.”
Pooling her resources
As director and head coach of the St. Sebastian swim team in Woodside, Queens, Shawn Slevin (above, left) puts 210 kids, ages 5 to 15, through their paces - freestyle, backstroke, butterfly and breast stroke - all school year. She logs 30 hours a week at intensive practices at the St. Sebastian Parish Center, at CYO meets throughout the Brooklyn-Queens diocese, and in administrative work. (Of course, this is on top of her regular job running her own human resources management firm.)
“My huge salary,” she says with a laugh, “is seeing the kids thrive.”
And indeed, they do. The boys’ and girls’ teams regularly place first in diocesan championships, and all the children learn discipline and self-confidence.
The New York-born-and-raised Shawn is herself a product of the team; she started helping coach at age 15 and has been running the show now for 21 years.
And if all that weren’t enough, Slevin recently launched the Swim Strong Foundation, a nonprofit to help foster new community-based swim programs and get disadvantaged kids into such programs.
9/11 families remembered
Retired FDNY member Lee Ielpi swallows hard whenever he passes the Tribute Center exhibit of a firefighter’s dusty jacket taken from Ground Zero. It belonged to his 29-year-old son, Jonathan, who died in the line of duty on 9/11, leaving a wife and two young children. Ielpi found his son’s remains after three months’ searching through the rubble, but worked for another six months helping other bereaved relatives locate their loved ones.
He helped establish the September 11th Families Association and co-founded the Tribute Center on Liberty St., a museum of artifacts, images and stories from that terrible day.
“It shows what ignorance and intolerance have done and continue to do,” says Ielpi, 62, who regularly leads tours of the exhibition.
The charismatic grandfather of four is also undergoing chemotherapy for a rare form of leukemia - which could be related to his time at Ground Zero.
The caring vet with a pet cause
When he’s not running his private Manhattan veterinary practice considered one of the best in the city, Dr. Andrew Kaplan heads the Toby Project, an organization dedicated to ending pet overpopulation. “Our goal is to make New York a ‘no-kill’ city by educating the public and launching a massive spay-neuter campaign,” says Kaplan, who aims to increase the amount of spay and neuter vans on our streets in the next several years. City Veterinary Care, twice named the city’s best by New York magazine, provides medical and surgical care to nonprofit rescue organizations. But Kaplan recently offered his services for free to several out-of-town patients - eight dogs and four cats rescued from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “All were given physical examinations,” says the 42-year-old vet, “and any problems identified were addressed.”
Torch bearer
In 1994, Clyde Frazier Jr. (no relation to the Knicks guard) started the SlamJam women’s basketball league as a way to display the often unnoticed talents of the city’s female players.
By 2001, its Classic Tournament had moved from a small gym at P.S. 194 to a national showcase. It had also become a key part of the mission of the Frederick L. Samuel Foundation, which Frazier started with his father, Clyde Sr. (left), in 1992 to help neighborhood youths with education, jobs and parenting.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Clyde Jr. was working his day job as a police officer at the World Trade Center. He guided others out one of the towers until it fell. He was 41.
Clyde Sr., a longtime community activist and veteran of the music business, picked up the Foundation torch. Hundreds of players from its tournaments have played Division 1 college ball. Thousands have been steered to college, employment and better lives.
Clyde Frazier Sr. says this is what he does: He keeps alive a dream no force of darkness could kill.
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