For over seven years, the Chestnut Hill Rotary Club has partnered with Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) to support individuals experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. From donating winter clothing to assembling and delivering peanut butter and jelly sandwiches twice a month, Rotary members have found many ways to align their mission of serving the community with our own.
The connection began with Rotary member Carol Bates. Years ago, her husband Don had been an academic advisee of PPP co-founder Dr. Judy Porter, and the two couples became friends. Through those conversations, Carol learned about PPP’s early work reducing HIV transmission in Kensington during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.
Inspired by what she heard, Bates began donating clothing and sandwiches to PPP and later shared the organization’s work with the Chestnut Hill Rotary Club. The group quickly embraced the mission and has supported PPP ever since.
This year’s service project in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day brought a particularly personal and creative touch to the partnership. For the first time, club members decided not just to donate ingredients for a meal, but to cook it themselves.
“We said, what if we just made the chili?” recalled Rotary member Maggie Stoeffel, who helped coordinate the effort. “Almost everybody in the club volunteered for something.”
Fifteen members prepared two gallons of chili each in their own kitchens. Others made rice, brownies, and cornbread. The dishes were dropped off at Stoeffel’s home and brought to PPP on February 9, where volunteers heated the chili in enormous pots set over gas burners.
“It was so delicious,” Stoeffel said. “We sampled it, and it was really, really good chili.”
Served with rice, shredded cheese, cornbread, brownies, and snack bags to take along, the meal was enough for about 200 people. Despite the bitter cold, the event was a meaningful day of service for everyone involved.
For Stoeffel, volunteering at PPP stands out because of the palpable, real-time impact.
“When you go down to Prevention Point, the need and the clientele are right there,” she said. “When you hand somebody a coat and they put it on… it chokes me up. It’s the best kind of service because it’s immediate and it’s personal.”
These moments of human connection, combined with PPP’s community-oriented atmosphere, keep Rotary members coming back—and make partnerships like this one especially meaningful.
If your local organization would like to partner with PPP on a service or fundraising project, please contact Natonda at natondag@ppponline.org.
Check out the Chestnut Hill Rotary Club’s blog post about their “Chilli-Fest” at PPP.