Local heroes

The Phoenix salutes six individuals whose efforts make Rhode Island a better place

The term "Renaissance," when placed in front of the word "City" and used to describe ours, has gotten to be a bit much. We know -- things have been shaking. But given that the rebirth is moving and has been, the questions, really, have more to do with how and why. The gross economy certainly had something to do with it, but the economic boom times are, by and large, nationwide. And yet it is the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations that has gotten the attention -- the New York Times articles, the ESPN and NBC festivals, the treacly television show. Why?

The answer, we believe, has as much to do with the six people honored here as our second annual batch of Local Heroes as anything else. Virgil Almeida, Naomi Craig, Bill Flynn, Donald W. King, Nondas Voll, Richard Walton. All of them, through organizations like the Fund for Community Progress, the Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty and the Providence Black Repertory Company, work to pull Rhode Island up by addressing need at its most basic physical and spiritual level: through the arts, through religion, through public service, through workers' rights and the simple act of feeding our children. These are the people in the trenches, those that make any other advance in our situation as a state and as a nation even morally plausible. They are, indeed, renaissance folk, and our debt to them grows daily.

Nondas Voll

GENUINE SELF-EFFACEMENT is the one quality I have come to expect from the people selected for our annual salute to local heroes. Therefore, I was not surprised when Nondas Voll responded to my request for an interview by listing other folks in the progressive activist community who she felt would be far better subjects to profile. The fact is that all of her suggestions have at least one thing in common with Nondas: they manifest their love and commitment towards their communities (to lift a phrase from the 1920 Anglican Book of Common Prayer), "not only with their lips, but in their lives."

Nondas is the executive director of the Fund for Community Progress [FCP], the umbrella organization for 23 nonprofit grassroots agencies in Rhode Island. The member organizations meet a number of diverse needs, from the Alliance for Better Long Term Care to the Center for Hispanic Policy & Advocacy, to Housing Network of R.I.

The FCP began 17 years ago, partly in response to the fact that, at the time, the United Way was not accepting advocacy groups or any additional member organizations. Both of those United Way policies have since changed -- something that Nondas says is a direct result of the FCP. "We have changed the landscape of the nonprofit community," she says.

Nondas herself is proof positive that if you have the vision, commitment and will, you can change your life. "When my four children were growing up, I had a mainstream job [director of PR and publications at Roger Williams University, where she also taught writing] and lived in a comfortable Victorian house on the East Side of Providence," she recalls. As soon as her youngest child graduated from college, Nondas, who had been an active volunteer with Shelter Services and Advent House, immediately shifted into full-time nonprofit work, moving into a more modest home in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Although she describes herself as "just a backroom coordinator," her energy, passion and boundless enthusiasm make her the heart and soul of the FCP's campaign.

Nondas and the FCP's patience in building democracy through progressive philanthropy have borne fruit. The FCP is unabashedly organic and advocacy-oriented and, compared to the well-heeled United Way, decidedly threadbare, with only two full-time staffers. As executive director of the incubator for most of the fledgling grassroots organizations that have sprung up in recent years to meet the needs of the people of Rhode Island, Nondas Voll continues to make a difference.
-- Rudy Cheeks

Walter Miller

WHEN 28-YEAR-OLD Donald W. King, the founder and artistic director of Providence Black Repertory Company, was growing up in Providence's Chad Brown housing project, he dreamed of putting the lives around him on film. His drive and talent got him to prep school, where King became excited about theater -- a more available way to tell such stories. At Brown University, he worked at Rites and Reasons Theatre under the late George Bass, learning to grow plays out of germinal ideas. One of those that he acted in, Mule Bone, was even taken to Broadway.

Learning how to develop plays and the success he had in theater only served to whet King's appetite: he yearned to develop a theater for a very specific reason. "I'm trying to fill a cultural void that exists here," he says. "I grew up in a neighborhood where there were a lot of talented people, but there wasn't any organization geared toward developing and supporting and nurturing that talent. So I'm trying to do that."

Rather than attempting to straight out convince hip-hop youth of the virtues of Shakespeare, or even August Wilson, King uses popular culture to lure those who might not normally be exposed to theater into its world. 'Round Midnight (see Best of, Arts & Entertainment) at the Providence Black Rep has become a Friday night occasion, offering hip-hop fans the opportunity to spend an alcohol-free night, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., listening to some 300 local MCs doing it up on stage. "The idea is that the kids who come to 'Round Midnight will see the stage and say, `Wow what's going on?' " and become active in theater, King says.

Homeboy rapper Raidge is one such dramatic success story. He wasn't interested in theater before becoming involved King's efforts, but Raidge went on to act in several productions at the Providence Black Rep and the nearby Trinity Repertory Theater.

King says he would like to grow the company into a larger regional theater that will retain the ability to attract diverse audiences, while also "charting the history of black theater in this country, but not being limited to it."

The theater company, which was launched in fall 1996, is more than halfway through a five-year audience development phase, although outreach efforts into the African-American community are hampered by limited staff. King's near-term goal is an annual budget of up to $300,000 -- roughly double the current amount. "Theater has been very good to me," King says. "It's been like a window for me to learn about the world."
-- Bill Rodriguez

Naomi Craig

WHEN NAOMI CRAIG took over the reins of the Sheldon Street Church in Fox Point in 1994, membership had dwindled to 18 people. But by the time Craig retired earlier this year, the church was overflowing every Sunday, with 50 chairs placed in the lobby to expand the building's 175-person capacity. She still glows at the memory of the church she lived next to as a child in West Elmwood, a place where she learned to love words, written or recited, and to love the Bible, "because it had so many surprises in it."

Craig attributes her success at Sheldon Street, for which she received an award in 1997 from the Board of National Ministries "for significant leadership in holistic evangelism," to her down-to-earth approach and a fresh point of view. Her sympathetic portrayal of the Samaritan woman at the well, often seen as a prostitute by male ministers, is a good example: "She was someone who truly wanted to learn, a feisty woman who was so honest," Craig says.

The 82-year-old Craig showed similar characteristics during her 22 years as a state social worker. Her lifelong credo, she says, has been: "If you know you can do something to help somebody, you should do it; If you know someone can do better, you should help them do it."

That ideal was particularly true with the clients she counseled at the state Department of Employment and Training. Craig found ways to prod and encourage the young women she met, calling them on the morning of their job interviews to make sure they went, and urging them to stop by on their lunch hours for additional career guidance. "Sometimes all they needed to feel was that you were listening to them," she says. "I thought, if they have the courage to talk to me, then I could have the patience to listen and to reassure them that someone was pulling for them."
-- Johnette Rodriguez

Richard Walton

IF RICHARD J. WALTON didn't exist, we would need to invent him. A lot of him. Journalist, author and activist par excellence, he remains the kind of socially concerned citizen that the '60s churned out by the rally-full, but whom the prosperous intervening decades have largely turned to SUVs and investment banking. The 1984 vice presidential candidate on the Citizens Party slate has seen quite a change from the days of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. "This is kind of an ebb period, I'm afraid," Walton says. "I don't know exactly why. There's no big wave right now that is sweeping people along with it. I'm involved with the Green Party, and there are a lot of fine young people there. But there's no sense of spark right now that's going to flare up into something all that significant."

The '51 Brown University grad went on to Columbia University's school of journalism, was the United Nations correspondent for Voice of America for six years, and helped then-Secretary General U Thant write his memoirs. Besides writing for almost every national publication with political clout, from the Washington Post to the New Republic, Walton has penned a dozen books, mostly on foreign policy. No knee-jerk lefty, two of his favorably reviewed volumes were the first book-length criticisms from the left of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy: The Remnants of Power (1968), and Cold War and Counter-Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (1972).

Walton has also practiced the heavy lifting of political and social concern. With others, he has made numerous trips to Providence's Nicaraguan sister city, Niquinohomo, helping to build a health clinic and a three-room schoolhouse. For the past 12 years, he has volunteered weekly at Amos House, the South Providence homeless shelter. Walton can be found serving breakfast there every Friday morning.

With his beard and shoulder-length white hair, typically accompanied by his trademark red bandanna and bib overalls, he's also a familiar sight nodding along with the folk music at the Stone Soup Coffeehouse, where he's currently president. At 71, Walton isn't about to give up. "I think all we can do is just keep plugging away, doing what we think is necessary to do, talking to people who will listen to us," he observes. "I guess I say, do whatever you can or throw in the towel. It's not much of a choice, is it?"
-- Bill Rodriguez

Bill Flynn

SOMETIMES A BUS RIDE can change your life. That's what happened when Georgetown University foreign service student Bill Flynn rode through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., in 1963 and noticed dozens of unemployed men hanging out on the street corners. Unsettled, Flynn transferred to the University of Michigan and worked straight through for a master's degree in social work. While there, he helped to set up a house for runaways, an inner-city food cooperative and a campaign to increase the enrollment of minority students.

Those early skirmishes on the barricades of economic and social reform set the stage for Flynn's post-collegiate jobs in Massachusetts and Maine, where he organized around tenants' rights and welfare rights. Then, in 1975, Flynn returned to Rhode Island, where he had lived as a teenager. His wife, Joan, found work as a physical therapist, while he stayed home with their toddler, William.

It was during the late '70s that Flynn met Henry Shelton, who was the head of the statewide Coalition for Consumer Justice. Flynn, who found both Shelton and his work compelling, got particularly involved with the coalition's one-state, one-rate telephone issue.

"I learned about persistence," Flynn recalls of his battles with the telephone company. "I learned that it really made a difference if a lot of people came out on an issue. And I learned that you could mobilize middle-income people -- nobody likes the phone company!"

Flynn later became involved with the ACLU, serving as treasurer for five years: "I learned the importance of fighting for people's rights to speak out, especially doing any organizing work," he says.

From '89-'97, Flynn was the director of advocacy and public policy at the Urban League, where he saw his role as a white person working in the black community as "trying to develop and promote leadership, but not to be too far out front myself."

Flynn is currently the coordinator of the Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty, another project of Shelton's Pawtucket-based George Wiley Center. As he currently strives to broaden the membership of the campaign, which has sparked victories in expanding school breakfast programs around the state, Flynn stresses its importance in "dealing with real issues of fairness and equity for the working poor."

"For me, as a social worker, the campaign's the only game in town," he says. "It's really important to be fighting to get rid of poverty. We haven't come so far from when I saw all those guys on the street corner just six blocks from the White House."
-- Johnette Rodriguez

Virgil Almeida

NOT MANY UNION presidents can literally claim to be Santa Claus. Not so for Virgil Almeida, who in 1996 legally changed his name to Santa Claus Almeida.

Almeida, a pot-bellied, white-bearded 67-year-old highway supervisor for the city of Pawtucket, gives toys to children and fights for decent wages for their parents. The son of Portuguese immigrants, Almeida traces his interest in Santa Claus to when he was 9 years old. On the way to a town-sponsored Christmas party in Bristol, he cut across a yard and happened to look through the window to see a local man, Mr. Deltoro, putting on a Santa Claus suit.

Once inside the party, Almeida lined up with the other children to get their gift from Santa. When the young Almeida's turn came, he piped up smartly, "You're not Santa Claus, you're Mr. Deltoro." The surprised Santa told Almeida he was a wise guy, ordered him to stand in the corner and refused to give him a gift. That night, Almeida says, he vowed that if he ever got old enough and fat enough, he would remake himself as Santa Claus and make sure no child ever left a Christmas party without a gift.

It was a long road to the North Pole, however. One of 23 kids at home, he left school and went to work at 16. Later he joined the Marines, became a middleweight boxing champion, and fought in the Korean War. Then he bummed around America, hopping trains, sleeping in hallways and working as a dishwasher and in other low paid jobs. "Maybe that's why I do what I do for the union," Almeida says. "There's got to be work [at a living wage] for everybody."

Almeida has been a member of the roofers' union, the rubber workers' union at the now-closed Converse sneaker plant in Bristol, and, most recently, president of the Pawtucket City Workers' Union, Local 1012 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He also regularly walks picket lines with striking workers from other unions.

Gesturing to the modest living room in his home in Pawtucket's Darlington section, Almeida says, "What I have here is money from unions. I wouldn't have the health benefits I have now if it wasn't for unions."

Not too far away, in his basement, are boxes of toys that people have given to him or which were purchased by Almeida and his wife, Loretta. During the Christmas season, Santa Claus Almeida distributes gifts at schools, day care centers and community centers. And he donates his $25 fee to Sojourner House for battered women, a Pawtucket soup kitchen or a shelter in Boston for homeless veterans.

Almeida invites Rhode Islanders to kick off the Christmas season with him at his home on Saturday, November 27. He'll be lighting the 14,000 holiday lights that adorn his house. A brief ceremony will then be held to remember prisoners of war and missing in action soldiers who never returned from the Korean and Vietnam Wars, including Loretta's brother, Butch Almeida.
-- Steven Stycos