April 30, 2004
by Lisa Snider

Hidden GEMS: One Hand, One Heart
Two juniors worked over the past four months to publish Hidden GEMS; One Hand, One Heart, a literary magazine providing homeless people with a means of exp ressing themselves and their talents.

According to founders juniors Emily Grunewald and Erika Herman, Hidden GEMS (which stands for Giving, Educating, Making Solutions) was created with the intention of stressing the poverty-related problems in Washington, D.C.

Grunewald and Herman were inspired to help those in need by a December 2003 seminar run by PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values.

The seminar featured a visit to Bruce-Monroe Elementary School, an underprivileged public school in Northwest D.C. They also heard three homeless men tell their life stories.
“We learned from a few of these men that one of their outlets of expression was writing. They wrote poetry and stories to help them express their feelings,” said Herman.

“We were really inspired by their stories and their talents to make a magazine that would be an outlet for their expression,” said Grunewald.

According to Grunewald, the PANIM seminar brought the concept of homelessness to a more tangible, emotional and understandable level.

“Even though we knew there was homelessness, poverty and inadequate education so close to us, we were never put face to face with it,” said Grunewald.

Grunewald and Herman aim to bring the same emotional effect they experienced at the seminar to their readers.
To cover all the publishing costs of their magazine, they raised about $7,500.

“We started an initial fund raising campaign [and] sent letters out to about 200 hundred families and corporations … that we knew of and that would probably give a fair amount of money,” she said.

According to Herman, the money was raised through financial aid requests circulated to the school community via e-mail and to the greater Jewish community via the Washington Jewish Week.

To help the magazine, The National Coalition for the Homeless sent Grunewald and Herman the poetry of four homeless men, some of whom spoke to the attendees at the PANIM seminar.
According to Herman, to compile the works of underprivileged children, she and Grunewald went to a third- grade class at Bruce-Monroe Elementary School with Pierre Valdez- Lewis, a homeless man, to give the nine-year-olds a chance to formally meet a homeless individual.

“We taught the children about homelessness and had them brainstorm and write different journal entries on how they perceived this homeless man and also about their own personal life situations,” she said.

According to a third-grade teacher at Bruce Monroe, Dan Jossen, students answered seven questions which Grunewald and Herman asked after Valdez-Lewis’s poetry reading. They also drew pictures and wrote journal entries expressing their reactions to hearing his poetry and meeting him.

“One of the most important parts of my job is exposing my students [to the real world]” and seeing “that he was a normal person and looked a lot like their brothers and uncles” was a phenomenal way of doing so, said Jossen.

“This is social studies—live,” Jossen said. “This is life.”
“The whole goal of the magazine is to try to reduce tensions between diverse groups of people, to promote awareness and more equal understanding of one another, and to alleviate judgment,” said Herman.

In an effort to continue their project after the magazine was published, Herman and Grunewald are currently planning a poetry reading at Bruce-Monroe.

In addition to members of the CES JDS community, Grunewald and Herman hope that Bruce-Monroe students and the students’ relatives will attend the poetry reading, along with the homeless men with whom they have worked during the last few months. According to Herman, the poetry reading “will be a good opportunity for students from JDS to learn about what’s out there and the conditions of this school and the kids’ lives.”