For these Wish Book donors, giving generously is a lifelong habit
Janet McAliley recalls her first winter in Miami. She was just 2 and she was living in a tent on Biscayne Boulevard with her parents, older sister and baby brother.
Jorge Gateno was raised by his hardworking single mom in Miami after they moved from Peru.
And Carol Damian learned from an early age from her parents that when you are “born lucky,” it’s your duty to share with others who may not be so fortunate.
McAliley, Gateno and Damian are three examples of so many for why Wish Book, a Miami Herald Charities project that helps families in need during the holiday season, has been such a success for 37 years.
Last year, for example, Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald readers donated more than $400,000. That figure includes the contributions of people like McAliley, Gateno and Damian, who have donated year in and year out to Wish Book for decades.
Damian and her husband, Vince, for example, have been donating $100 every year since 1999 — and likely longer, “as far back as my records go on the computer,” said Wish Book coordinator Roberta DiPietro.
Chances are none of these individuals would likely be comfortable being called a “super donor.” But what they regularly do is give quietly because they feel it’s the right thing to do.
Why do they do it?
A winter in a tent on Miami streets
For Janet McAliley — a former Miami-Dade School Board member, a longtime champion of civil and human rights, and a current board member of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center — giving was inspired by a long-ago experience on the Miami streets.
“My family arrived in Miami in 1936 after my father lost his job in New York in the Depression. We spent that first winter in a tent on Biscayne Boulevard near where the Broad Causeway is now,” McAliley, 85, recalls. “That experience and others that followed sensitized me to the struggles of others.”
Her father was a World War I veteran and had a small disability pension of about $40 a month. “That was what we had,” McAliley remembers. “My sister was 4 and my brother was around 1. We tied his crib on top of an old Packard, and that’s how we ended up in Miami. That’s why I always loved ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and always identified with the Joads.”
Work was hard to find, especially with a disability. The family moved around a lot, mainly in Allapattah and the northwest section of town.
“I remember an apartment near the dump, the incinerators near Jackson Memorial Hospital,” McAliley said from her Grove Isle home. “My father was sort of a fighting Irishman, and he got into an argument with the landlord of that building, and she tried to stab him with an ice pick, I think it was. My mother called the police, but when they came, they arrested my father.
“As a young child I saw my father arrested a couple times because of arguing with the landlord,” McAliley said. “This made me very aware of the struggle of people who have difficulties in life because they are poor. So Wish Book was helpful to me in trying to address those longstanding concerns that developed in my childhood.”
McAliley’s campaigns for her four terms on the Miami-Dade School Board between 1980 and 1996 also shaped her philanthropic nature.
Campaigning, McAliley said, was “a lot of hard work, but I regarded that as a great privilege because I got to know Miami-Dade County. In a lot of ways, I was fortunate to have those experiences because it makes us more aware of what’s going on around us — and so much of that is still going on in Miami.”
‘Growing chain of support in the community’
Jorge Gateno’s charitable impulse ignited right after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Miami-Dade in August 1992.
He was 13.
“I was volunteering at the Red Cross shelter throughout the days and I had people come back and give me hugs, telling me how much we helped them with the items. That just stuck with me,” Gateno, 40, said.
He’s told the story of the woman he met in a long line awaiting aid for her husband after Andrew. She desperately needed penicillin, but the line was long and not moving. Gateno knew where the medicine was, so he slipped some in his pocket and gave it to the South Miami-Dade woman, Samsung Newsroom wrote in a profile piece.
She returned the next day to thank him and give him a hug.
“Volunteering has always been a part of my DNA,” Gateno said from his home in Kendall. “The older I’ve gotten I believed we can all help in one way or another. Those in better situations it’s our duty to help even more.”
So Gateno, a senior sales manager with Samsung, co-founded the nonprofit Friends for Global Change with five friends to help on a global scale. The foundation began its efforts nine years ago in Nepal. The group has since aided orphanages in Haiti and Colombia, “a ton of stuff in the Keys after the hurricane, the Bahamas,” he said.
Wish Book gives Gateno and his team an outlet closer to home.
“Wish Book is an amazing avenue to help those in our community and it allows those who live here to help out whichever way they can,” Gateno said.
“The more we help each other, the more we can influence those around us and future generations to help those that are in need,” Gateno said. “Our goal has always been to help as many people as we can so that they can have a little cheer during the holiday season. Our hope is that some of these families, especially those with youth, are able to improve their situations and lives and be able to give back in the future, growing the chain of support in the community.”
Ask for help and still be proud
For Carol Damian, charitable giving has been a lifelong habit. As a child, she gave a percentage of her allowance to people she met on the streets of Connecticut, her birthplace.
“That was our way of appreciating and giving back. Not everyone is lucky and a lot of life is luck,” Damian, 77, said from her home in Coral Gables.
Damian, a Latin American and Caribbean art historian, moved to Miami in 1964. She spent 25 years at Florida International University, where she was the director and chief curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum before retiring in 2018.
The life she has led has been colorful and rewarding. She keeps it that way by giving back to the community through endeavors like Wish Book.
“I”m inspired by the stories,” she said. “It’s a very direct way that you can help somebody in your community rather than giving to some big organization where you never know where your money is going. This is going to people in our community, and everyone has a responsibility to help someone,” Damian said..
Her parents would have expected no less.
“We were not a rich family by any means, but I was always taught that I was very, very lucky and that if I could so something uplifting for somebody else, to share that,” Damian said. “My father went to medical school but was working as a janitor. That’s the American story I think was instilled in us.”
Damian wants Wish Book recipients to know this: They are heard and they should not fear asking for assistance.
“I hope the message is ‘Don’t worry. There are people out there for you and you can still hold your head up. Just because your needs are more than my needs doesn’t mean you have to be less proud.’ ”
HOW TO HELP
Wish Book is trying to help hundreds of families in need this year. To donate, pay securely at MiamiHerald.com/wishbook. For information, call 305-376-2906 or email wishbook@miamiherald.com. (The most requested items are often laptops and tablets for school, furniture, and accessible vans.) Read more at MiamiHerald.com/wishbook.
This story was originally published December 8, 2019 at 12:25 PM.
