Work On Timely, ‘Hidden’ Social Issues Recognized With Purpose Prizes

Six charity founders and entrepreneurs, with an average age of nearly 68, have won the top awards in the fourth annual Purpose Prizes, given by Civic Ventures, a think tank in San Francisco that seeks to involve older people in civic activities.

The prizes, sponsored by Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation, are designed to recognize people over 60 who are social innovators.

Four of the top winners will each receive $100,000; the other two, Stephen and Elizabeth Alderman, are a married couple who collaborate on a project and will share their $100,000 prize.

An additional five winners received $50,000 each. Previously, the second-tier Purpose Prize awards were $10,000 for each winner, and more winners were chosen. “Over all, we’re giving the same amount of money, but we wanted to make a bigger investment in people we thought had really terrific ideas and social innovations,” says Alexandra Kent, director of the Purpose Prizes. “We decided that boosting our second tier of winners would enable those people to do their next big thing.”

Ms. Kent says that the awards committee received about 1,200 nominations from the public this year, more than in any previous year. The panel of 23 judges was again chaired by Sherry Lansing, the former movie-studio executive who now heads her own eponymous foundation.

Economy and War

The award winners are all working on urgent matters, Ms. Kent says. “The winners and their projects really reflect what is timely and important to our country as a whole,” she says, with awards going to projects that create jobs, develop technology that aids the environment, or treat soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Also, she says, “we have a few winners who are dealing with issues that I think are hidden, that aren’t necessarily well known.”

Chief among these, she says, would be a pair of $50,000 prize honorees: Connie Siskowski, whose organization, Caregiving Youth Project, in Boca Raton, Fla., focuses on children who take care of aged or ailing family members; and Marcy Adelman, founder of Openhouse, a group in San Francisco that helps provide low-cost housing and care for elderly gay or lesbian people who might otherwise face discrimination when seeking that help.

The $100,000 Purpose Prize winners are:

Elizabeth and Stephen Alderman, both 68, founders of the Peter C. Alderman Foundation, in Bedford, N.Y.

The couple, whose son, Peter, died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, created the foundation in 2003 to help treat victims of trauma and terrorism around the world. The group creates local mental-health systems in places where violence has destabilized communities. Elizabeth Alderman is a former special-education teacher, and her husband is a retired oncologist.

To date, the foundation has trained nearly 350 doctors in 19 countries — who have in turn trained hundreds of nurses and other medical professionals — how to care for trauma patients. The charity also operates nine mental-health clinics in Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Haiti.

Judith Broder, 69, founder and director, the Soldiers Project, in Studio City, Calif.

Dr. Broder, a psychiatrist, created an organization that provides free, confidential, unlimited mental-health therapy to active-duty military personnel, military veterans, and their families. The organization, says Ms. Broder, fills a niche for those who “can’t or won’t” seek services from the Department of Veterans Affairs or other military channels, such as unmarried couples, gay and lesbian soldiers and their partners, or soldiers who fear career damage for seeking care, or who feel too fragile to navigate military bureaucracy.

Since it was created five years ago, the Soldiers Project has treated more than 300 clients in its Los Angeles-area location. The volunteer-run charity also has independently run satellite organizations in New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Washington, and four other California cities, with plans for further expansion.

Don Coyhis, 66, founder of White Bison, in Colorado Springs.

Mr. Coyhis, who grew up on a Mohican reservation in Wisconsin and, despite a successful business career, long struggled with alcoholism, founded White Bison in 1988 to offer recovery resources that are derived from Native American culture. The charity, which today runs with a staff of five people, began a movement called “wellbriety,” which combines overall wellness with sobriety.

Mr. Coyhis, who has been sober for 30 years, has trained thousands in the wellbriety system, via both personal appearances (he logs 125,000 miles per year to meet with Native American groups, he says) and through videotaped sessions, books, workshops, and video clips on YouTube.

Henry Liu, 73, president, Freight Pipeline Company, in Columbia, Mo.

A retired University of Missouri engineering professor, Mr. Liu invented a means of transforming fly ash — a toxic byproduct of burning coal — into bricks. The process is less expensive and more energy-efficient than traditional means of making bricks from clay, and doesn’t contribute to global warming.

The technology has been licensed for production and commercial use to companies in 11 nations, including the United States, China, and India. Currently, Mr. Lui is working on capsule pipeline technology, a process by which, he says, freight could be moved efficiently through underground pipelines.

Tim Will, 61, executive director, Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center, in Rutherfordton, N.C.

Mr. Will, a former telecommunications systems analyst and high-school teacher, bought a farm in Rutherfordton, N.C., three years ago, moving from Miami because he was entranced by the rural area’s natural beauty. Through his organization, a nonprofit group designed to support small businesses and provide local Internet access, he won a $1.4-million grant from the Golden Leaf Foundation to provide online access to the county’s schools and police and fire departments; a year later, every county school was fully wired, and technology training was underway for the schools’ teachers.

He also helped link local small family farms with restaurants in Charlotte, N.C., creating an online ordering system that enabled the farms to grow crops specifically for those dining establishments. The system has helped workers laid off from nearby textile mills return to farming.

The Purpose Prizes also recognized the following individuals with prizes of $50,000 each:

Marcy Adelman, 63, co-founder, Openhouse, San Francisco.

A psychologist, Ms. Adelman created Openhouse with her late partner to help provide low-cost housing for elderly people who are gay or lesbian, and to train service providers to make them more sensitive to the needs of gay and lesbian older adults.

Duncan Campbell, 65, founder, Friends of the Children, Portland, Ore.

Mr. Campbell, who had two alcoholic parents, went on to a successful career as an investor, but never forgot what it was like to essentially raise himself as a child. In 1993, he started Friends of the Children, a nonprofit group that provides the most disadvantaged children with a caring, consistent (and paid) adult mentor from the time a child is age 5 until adulthood.

Ann Higdon, 69, founder, Improved Solutions for Urban Systems, Dayton, Ohio.

Ms. Higdon, who grew up homeless and credits an inspiring teacher with sparking a love of learning, created Improved Solutions for Urban Systems. The nonprofit group runs three charter schools and provides more than 400 high-school dropouts with training in nursing, construction, computer operation, and manufacturing skills, helping students gain certification in those fields, earn high-school diplomas, and move on to college or jobs.

Connie Siskowski, 63, founder, Caregiving Youth Project, Boca Raton, Fla.

Ms. Siskowski, who took care of a grandparent in her early teenage years, created a nonprofit organization in 2006 to sponsor support groups in middle schools for children who take care of family members. The charity also offers classes on life skills and stress management, and provides other resources for young caregivers.

James Smallwood, 62, founder, The Choice Is Yours, Camden, N.J.

A former cocaine addict, Mr. Smallwood created his nonprofit organization in the mid-1990s to train ex-convicts, addicts, and homeless people for work in the construction trades, while helping them with reading, math, and job-hunting skills. The group, which operated in Philadelphia as well as Camden, has had about 600 graduates go on to jobs in the trades, with 82 percent staying employed during the two years after graduation that the charity tracks their cases.