“Coach Danny,” that”™s what the kids from low-income homes and homeless shelters call businessman Daniel Bernstein in their afterschool program in Mount Vernon. This month those kids, some 135 of them from the first through the sixth grades, will be reunited with their gently guiding coach in the Amazing Afternoons program at Edward Williams School.
The kids might not know it, but Coach Danny worked overtime in the academic offseason for them and for the volunteers like him, both teens and adults, whose privileged lives in Westchester have been more deeply enriched by their ties to the students in Mount Vernon. Bernstein led a team of volunteers from Scarsdale in a money-scoring rally and stirring comeback when it seemed that time, and the state of New York, had run out on Amazing Afternoons.
“It”™s like a miracle,” said Mary Figueroa, the afterschool program”™s director. She was speaking of the community fundraising effort that raised $162,000 by late September, enough to reopen her program this month, while Bernstein spearheads the final push to raise the $200,000 needed to keep it running through the full school year.
“He”™s done a tremendous job,” Figueroa said, speaking of Coach Danny”™s fundraising leadership.
“I”™m not a fundraiser. I”™m a lay guy in this whole thing,” Bernstein said.
Danny Bernstein began his career in his family”™s third-generation lingerie business in Manhattan, Sidney Bernstein & Son Lingerie Inc. After 21 years in the industry, “I saw the diminishing opportunities for business when the lights were going out on Madison Avenue” for smaller manufacturers and wholesalers. “The paradigm was changing too quickly.”
Having sold the family business, Bernstein in 2005 founded Backyard Sports in White Plains, a company dedicated to putting back the play and pulling back the parents in youth sports. Sports have become too organized and the playing field too much a pressured ground stripped of joy and fun for kids, in his view. A former high school and college soccer player, Bernstein made his company”™s mission “to recreate the timeless value of sandlot sports, teaching our young athletes the power of play and the true meaning of athletic competition.”
At Backyard Sports, “We separate the parents and we let the kids play” in programs run at the SUNY Purchase gymnasium. The irony in that arrangement ”“ organizing programs to make sports less organized for kids ”“ is not lost on Bernstein.
At Backyard Sports, kids from Westchester”™s high-income enclaves play and compete with kids from lower-income communities. Calling it “an investment in human capital,” Bernstein gives scholarships to children whose families cannot afford the program and has bused them to the Purchase campus. “I”™m seeing sports as a platform to make a difference where kids need it the most.”
At Edward Williams School, the afterschool program has made a big difference in its 10 years of operation. It can put a child on a path of academic and social success and steer a child away from the troubles that beckon on afterschool streets in impoverished neighborhoods and in unstructured homes.
From 3 to 6 p.m. on school days, it provides homework tutoring by adults and high school students, cultural enrichment programs that include rotating artists in residence from the Pelham Arts Center and recreational activities led by Coach Danny. The Mount Vernon school district provides the use of the elementary school and pays the salaries of four supervising teachers.
“All the research indicates that children get into the most trouble if they”™re unsupervised from 2:30 to 6:30,” Figueroa said.
She is employed by Westchester Jewish Community Services, the nonprofit agency that started the Mount Vernon program 11 years ago with a grant from the state Office of Child and Family Services. The agency partners with several religious and community organizations and businesses to provide volunteers and resources.
Members of the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, including Danny Bernstein and his son, have developed mutually rewarding relationships with the Mount Vernon pupils and their families. About seven years ago, boys and girls from the temple began tutoring Edward Williams pupils for their bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah projects. That led students at Scarsdale High School to form an Edward Williams Afterschool Club, whose members last year raised several thousand dollars for the program.
Like other worthy programs, Amazing Afternoons was a victim of the state”™s budget crisis. Officials at Westchester Jewish Community Services were told the $200,000 state grant would not be available this year. Come back next year and the funds might be restored, they were told.
“The program was actually over if we didn”™t have this fundraising effort,” Figueroa said.
At the sponsoring agency, “They were prepared to shed tears” over the program”™s demise, Bernstein said. “They were prepared to let this program go.”
But its volunteers in Scarsdale chose to fight for a program in which they”™ve invested so much human capital, and have reaped returns beyond measure, in the last decade.
“It”™s too important to the kids,” Danny Bernstein said. “It”™s too important to Mount Vernon. With all the crap that goes on and all the bad press and publicity about Mount Vernon, this program truly is a shining star. It truly is too important a program to lose.
“We intend this program to go on for a very long time. This is a program that should be modeled in other areas.”
Coach Danny”™s team has not yet reached its goal, but they”™ve already won. It”™s a victory for two communities, for both the haves and the have-nots of Westchester.
