Seymour Zwickler — our beloved co-founder — died on May 24, 2015. His wit, brains and
sense of humor helped build the foundation. Seymour always questioned our ideas and strategic direction
and more often than not his insight set the tone for our grant giving. We intend to shortly dedicate a
room at AIDS Service Center (ASCNYC) in Seymour, Phil and Michael Levines' (Caren's late husband) honor.
Fortunately, a suitable replacement wasn't far away. Randi Zwickler, Seymour's 27 year old granddaughter,
was unanimously elected to join the board of trustees. After graduating college, Randi has spent most of
her young career doing non-profit work. She has already made impact by investigating several new grantees
and working with our Web guru, Deborah Chow, on some updates which will be up shortly.
As for foundation business, we again had a record year of grant giving. As we noted in last year's
letter we gave a grant to Village Care, to begin operating its "Community Granting Empowerment Program."
Besides a great hot meal, the program offers Job Readiness, Life Skills such as budgeting and financial
management and Wellness (fitness) courses. In addition, there have been three "community gatherings" — on
World AIDS day, during Black History month and on World Health day. Please click here to read about each of
these events and the positive affect on the clientele. The program is located at 121 West 20th Street in
New York City. There is no screening, sign ups or commitments.
I visited NYU's Fales Library in late 2015 and viewed their exhibit called "Positive/Negative HIV/AIDS."
The exhibit featured written materials, artifacts and the recently digitized tapes of Lou Maletta,
which we helped them acquire from Lou in 2008. In addition, Marvin Taylor, the head of Fales, told me
that the works of one of Phil's best friends and co-producer, the late David Wojnarowicz, will be exhibited
at the Whitney Museum within the next year or so. We made a donation to the Library, which has done an
excellent job preserving historic gay, lesbian and transgender materials.
As usual, our friend Tracy Dougherty continues to ride her bicycle for an AIDS Cure. It's been over
10 years since we met and supported her. She currently rides to help fund research at Emory University's
AIDS center, which is doing pioneering work. We share a bond in that she, like Caren and I, lost a brother
to HIV/AIDS. Last but not least, we are extremely proud to announce that two of our Cornell fellows,
Amy L. Stone and Jamie Cantrell, edited and published a book called Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories.
We donated funds to help pre-market the book, which makes excellent reading and includes several chapters
written by fellow grantees of our 15 year Cornell fellowship program.
Until next year...
Allen Zwickler
Trustee
Phil Zwickler Charitable & Memorial Foundation Trust
