Blogger Jeff Simmermon, whose recent disagreement with Murky Coffee in Arlington and its iced espresso policy grabbed headlines, has turned his attention toward more weighty matters. Simmermon is using his blog, And I Am Not Lying, to raise money for the family of Marisol Caceres, the 12-year-old girl found strangled in her Northeast home.

The blogger  knows the victim’s stepbrother, Jose Andrade. In an Aug. 6 post, Simmermon tells how he interviewed Andrade in 2006 “about a walkout he and YARG [Youth Action Research Group] put together at his high school to support a just immigration reform.”

The writer took an automatic shine to the worldly teen:

Not only was he the most thoughtful, intelligent, precocious and wise 19-year-olds I’d ever met - he may have been one of the wisest human beings I’d ever met. Once he opened up to me a little, he was this busted fire hydrant of knowledge about philosophy, classical music, video games and maybe jazz, too. The only organ bigger than Jose’s mind is his heart. I remember a lot of late nights at our friend Danielle’s place, him telling me about growing up in Columbia Heights while I made us dinner.

Though he didn’t know Marisol personally, Simmermon says he “saw her effect on Jose, and I could feel his love for her just pour out of him when he told me how smart she was, how kind and giving she was even as such a little girl.”

After a few more earnest words, the blogger asks his readers to dig deep into their pocket: “Marisol’s family needs money now. They need it badly.” Among other things, the family needs money to move: “Imagine having to come home to that same apartment every night.” A PayPal “Make a Donation” button appears toward the end of the post.

Via e-mail, Simmerman says that the last time he checked, which was Monday, readers had ponied up $2,000.

He adds that the donations aren’t the only positives being generated by the post: Marisol’s relatives and friends are connecting with each other in the comments section. Particularly moving is a note of support written to Jose Andrade, and left by his evidently estranged father, Jose H. Andrade Sr.:

Son You may not want to read this but I hope you do, I want you to know that I LOVE YOU with all my heart and I wish you would let me help you, you are not alone just open your heart and let me in.

your friend talks very nice about you, so I know you have a big heart Henry jr. I always wanted to be part of your life and now more than ever, son life is short lets not waste more time. I can not fix the past but the future can be better. We remember Marisol when she was little and we know how much you love her. Tell you mom and your sister that we’re very sad for your lose and that we’re HERE to help this is my email andrade***** I LOVE YOU Darling, Sabrina y Kevin.

—Rend Smith

After more than 30 years of working in the Defense Department, the last five spent at the Pentagon dealing with issues related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Judy Kopff is taking more seriously her job as a clown.

Her last day at the office of the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Logistics & Materiel Readiness - Program Support) was yesterday. In her farewell note to colleagues, she writes: “I now plan to become a full-time volunteer clown and spend time during the week doing what I’ve had time to do only on weekends for the past few years: bringing smiles to the faces of children and children-at-heart.”

Kopff, who has brought her act, along with her husband, to NIH Children’s Inn, Children’s Hospital, Georgetown Hospital’s pediatric ward, and INOVA Fairfax’s pediatric ward, among other places, now plans to spend the bulk of her clown time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. At Walter Reed, she feels a connection to the wounded vets and their families: the people her former job, in some way, affected.

She’s careful with the balloons around some, though. They pop. “So you can imagine the trauma that could bring up, especially if you’re a patient just back from Iraq or Afghanistan. So we’re careful. We ask. Or we just do magic tricks,” she says.

Sometimes she’ll ask patients what other VIPs, besides her, have visited. Some say the Secretary of Defense. “Oh, he’s my boss,” she’ll say. “But, to be honest, they’re more impressed with the Redskins cheerleaders.”

No matter. Kopff, 61, still plans to go often, driving from her Cleveland Park house to Mologne House on the grounds of Walter Reed, where she arrives in her getup, complete with a 3-foot baloon hat she gives away at each visit and clown shoes dating from the 1950s. She doesn’t wear face paint, since “some children and, really some adults, are afraid of a clown with face paint.”

The kids at Walter Reed, most of whom are dependents of the soldiers, “love it.” The parents welcome the distraction. Soldiers alone in a room will get the full clown treatment if they’re up for it. “There was this one guy, very handsome, probably in his mid-20s, about 6-5, in a wheelchair and missing a leg. He was outside smoking with his mom and yelled to me: ‘Hello, Clown. If you ever want to get rid of those shoes, I’m a size 16….I can take one of them.’ So they make me laugh sometimes.”

Kopff does more than clown for the vets. Since last December, she’s been collecting music and movies for them. She and her husband are no longer accepting VHS tapes (”my husband said, ‘Enough, already’”), but they will take any DVDs, DVD players, or CDs and donate them either to Walter Reed or the the D.C. VA Medical Center. She keeps a big box on her front porch on Newark Street NW as a dropoff. Got media you’d like to pile in? E-mail Judy: jkopff[at]aol[dot]com. Maybe if you’re nice, she’ll make you a poodle.

It appears that the financial crisis facing one of DC’s main health care providers for Latinos has been averted. In June, la Clinica del Pueblo announced it would have to cut services if it couldn’t recoup a $500,000 deficit. Interim executive director Enrique Cobham says an anonymous donor sent a check for $50,000 and has promised another $50,000 if the clinic can raise a matching sum of individual donations. Topped off with emergency help from the city, he says, the needed money will be in the bank soon enough to cover expenses.

La Clinica started as a one night a week drop-in center in the 1980s and now serves 7,500 patients a year, most of them uninsured Latino immigrants. For the most part, the clinic has kept up with growing demand. From 2000 to 2007, the budget rose from $1 million to about $7 million. But growth brought problems as well. Last summer, the federal government awarded the clinic certification as a federally qualified health center, which meant they could bill Medicaid at a higher rate and get access to additional grants and other federal funds. But the status also required an immediate expansion of services, which meant spending money they didn’t yet have. The cost of the expansion wiped out the center’s cash on hand, leading to the current situation.

Having overcome the immediate crisis, Cobham says his staff is “working on restructuring things to make sure we don’t get into this challenge again in the future.” In the long run, he says, la Clinica saves the city money by offering an alternative to the emergency room. “We play a major roll not only in serving community needs but also in reducing the incidence of more expensive health care that comes from people not receiving basic primary care,” he says.

Is it me? We’re you shocked over the Food & Friends honcho’s salary revealed in today’s Post? Executive Director Craig M. Shniderman makes $357,447.

Wow.

Schniderman makes more than most if not all agency heads in the city. And he runs a non-profit. That simply feeds people.

The rule of thumb on judging non-profits is how much money the non-profit devotes to their core mission vs. how much money they spend on administrative costs and salaries. Food & Friends budget obviously feels a bit off.

Schniderman’s defense to the paper of record: His salary increased just 4 percent this year. So let me get this straight. He’s been making this huge salary for a couple years now. That’s not much of a defense.

From the Post:

Last year, Shniderman received a salary of $270,290, as well as $31,318 in various insurances and a pension plan and $55,839 in deferred compensation.

He goes on to tell the Post that he has no plans to take a pay cut. Of course, the non-profit announced it will be scaling back its operations due to rising costs and slacking donations.

Word is the Young Women’s Christian Association’s (YWCA) Gallery Place Fitness and Aquatics Center, located at 624 Ninth Street NW, will be shutting its doors on May 19th. The YWCA of the District of Columbia, which has been in operation since 1905, has run into financial troubles.

According to the organization’s Web site, the mission of the YWCA is ” to eliminate racism and empower women and their families with career education and training, health and wellness, and child and youth development programs that foster independence, economic stability, and overall well-being.”

Though its social programs have often been an integral part of our city, the Capital Area YWCA is perhaps best known for supplying a place for District residents to work out on the cheap.

Besides maintaining a gym and pool, the Gallery Place Fitness and Aquatic Center offers classes like boxing, yoga, and karate. Amanda Anderson, who recently joined the Y so she she could get in shape by swimming laps in its four-lane pool, says she’ll miss the casual atmosphere and friendly people there.

“The place seems to be full of real people,” she says.

A just-penned YWCA press release states that ” An increase in fitness competitors and escalating costs related to pool operations were factors in the closure.”

In 2006 the YWCA formed a task force that sought ways of keeping Gallery Place Fitness and Aquatics Center open and sustainable. “Many of the suggestions were implemented including a modest dues increase, but the bottom line remained in the red,” says the press release.

The good news is, the approximately 1,000 members that have made the gym part of their fitness regimen won’t have to pay for May, and the YWCA is planning on hooking these jilted patrons up with “special rates at other fitness centers in the area.”

—Rend Smith

Hey, D.C.ers, get ready for all those people walking around town in pink garb. The Avon Walk for Breast Cancer blankets the streets this Saturday and Sunday.

And according to the walk’s organizers, “award-winning actress” Reese Witherspoon will be “on hand.”

Well, “on hand” is fine and all, but is she going to pound the pavement like those thousands of other die-harders whose devotion to the cause gets measured in miles? I mean, think about it: Walkers get a choice of walking a marathon (26.2 miles) or a marathon and a half (39.3) over the course of a weekend.

According to a press release, however, Witherspoon will “support walkers at points along Sunday’s route.”

Hell, even I’ve done that in years past. Yeah, go get’em, I’ve yelled to various walkers in years past.

So what does Witherspoon got that I don’t?

Members of former boy band Hanson have disclosed that prior to next week’s show at the State Theatre they will go on a “one-mile” walk around Falls Church “to raise money and consciousness for fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa.”

Noble cause, Mmmmm-Boppers. But…one mile? One? For real?

Oh, well. AIDS and poverty have plagued Africa for so long already. What’s a while longer?

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, a charity funded by the 1999 sale of the Redskins to Dan Snyder, is seeking gifted middle school kids to stock this year’s class of its Young Scholars Program.

Those accepted will “receive educational advising, financial support for educational opportunities during high school, and the possibility of a college scholarship.”

It’s a national search, but 20 percent of the spots are reserved for kids from the DC area. Applications have to be in by May 5.

In November, City Paper profiled a Petworth teen that went into the Cooke Foundation’s mentoring program in middle school, and is now attending the Madeira School.

What are kids in America to do with their $1 bills, now that the children of Afghanistan don’t need ‘em?

While recently mulling how I never do anything nice for anybody, I thought back to that speech President Bush made a few weeks after 9/11, when he asked all our nation’s children to send a dollar to the White House and assured the little boys and girls that he’d get their George Washingtons to the youngsters of Afghanistan.

When he made the speech, Bush was four days into bombing Afghanistan up to the stone age. Bush said that his program, which over the years the White House alternately called the Afghan Children’s Fund and the Fund for the Children of Afghanistan, was “modeled on the original 1938 March of Dimes campaign” concocted by FDR.

Suddenly, even folks outside of strip joints were talking about $1 bills. To keep attention on his feel-good idea, Bush then went around to schools to talk about all the “bake sales” and “lemonade stands” that have popped up around the U.S. to help with the effort.

But while nobody was looking, the Fund died a death quieter than Abe Vigoda’s. (What? Abe Vigoda’s still alive? Oh…Well, exactly!)

I went looking for an update on the campaign and found this brief announcement buried on the White House Website:

“As of April 1, 2005 the Afghan Children’s Fund is no longer accepting contributions. President Bush thanks those among America’s youth who participated for their support.”

Just like that? Gone? Am I the only one surprised by this news? Far as I can tell, the fund’s termination didn’t get a single mention in the Washington Post. (Perhaps, after all hoopla the campaign got at its birth, reporters figured this was an April Fools announcement.) I couldn’t find any explanation from the White House about why the fund was terminated. I guess all the kids in Afghanistan are doing peachy. Or maybe our government figured they’d just spend the dollar bills on heroin.

As for Bush’s comparison of his brainchild to Roosevelt’s: The March of Dimes helped get rid of Polio in this country and the organization still thrives; before being put to sleep, the Afghan Children’s Fund got some fabulous PR for the White House and a few crayons shipped into the desert.

Call it a draw.

The Marine Corps’ local Toys for Tots drive is in trouble, according to WAMU and NBC4. It’s tempting to pin the charity’s troubles on the tangled language on its Web site, such as this graf, which could have only been composed by someone who’s given many years of service to this country’s military:

Private organizations will not receive bulk toys to distribute at their respective holiday parties. Organizations that are attempting to do this need, instead, to submit an individual request for each family utilizing the www.dctoysfortots.org website. This will effectively help those families sign up as Toys for Tots recipients. These families will be contacted individually by one of the distribution sites to inform them of when and where to pick up the toys. If the family is in need of transportation, then this is how your private organization can help; by providing the family the transportation needed to transport them to and from the distribution center. Once again private organizations will not receive bulk toys to distribute.

But more likely, it’s because Washingtonians are cheap, cold-hearted bastards. You have till next Monday.

In its heyday, many prominent people supported the Eastern Branch of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. “It was a central charity of the NBA All-Star Game,” Capitol Hill resident Jim Myers says. “Clinton painted a wall there.”

Last month, however, far less credible advocates lobbied on behalf of the Capitol Hill club. On Nov. 27, Marc Borbely was on his way to class at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law when he spotted several kids soliciting money for the club. “‘Please help us try to keep the Eastern Boys & Girls Branch open,’” he remembers them saying. Borbely found their plea strange: The branch has been closed since August.

Kerrin Torres, spokesperson for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, says, “If we did solicit funds, we’re not raising money for the Eastern Branch.” She says anyone who sees kids trying to raise money for the clubs on street corners or at Metro stops should call the organization immediately.

“It’s bittersweet that people are trying to raise money for the club we don’t have,” says Myers.

With the charity marathon long since passé, what’s a socially conscious D.C. adventure girl to do? Well, in late August, Rajshree Solanki and Jen Cook plan to battle heat, monsoon rains, and insane traffic on a 1,200-mile race across Southern India in a three-wheeled autorickshaw.

Call it Baja 1000 meets Race for the Cure. The Mumbai Xpress Rally is a 13-day race from Chennai to Mumbai that benefits Indian villages. Solanki, a 31-year-old sometime Elvis impersonator who works at the National Museum of the American Indian, says participation was Cook’s idea.

“She woke me up from a dead sleep and asked me if I wanted to do it. I said sure, thinking she was not serious. Now here we are.”

An autorickshaw is a three-wheeled vehicle often used as a taxi in India and other countries. Cook, who works at a scooter shop in Connecticut, knows how to drive one. “She just doesn’t know how to go into reverse,” Solanki says.

Team RickshawGrrl is collecting funds to sponsor an Indian village with books, medical supplies and clothes. Solanki and Cook are hosing a fundraiser at Franklin’s in Hyattsville on July 17. To donate a portion of your bill, mention the Indian Relief Fund.