By Julie Shapiro
Sarah Reetz rushed down the middle of Duane St. Saturday morning, listening intently to a voice from her headset.
Taste of Tribeca, a food festival and fundraiser for local schools, would start in half an hour, and Reetz had more things to do than she could count on her fingers. The credit card readers needed a new role of printing tape, the corporate sponsors needed welcome packages and the restaurant booths needed plates and napkins.
Wearing a neon orange Taste of Tribeca staff T-shirt and matching orange-tinted sunglasses, Reetz dodged trays, carts and chairs, pausing only to answer a volunteer’s question or smile a quick hello to a chef.
Then, suddenly, she cocked her head and stopped moving. A rogue hot dog vendor was trying to crash Taste of Tribeca, a voice from her headset told her. The vendor was trying to peddle hot dogs and bottles of soda alongside the legitimate Taste vendors.
Reetz pulled the small microphone of the headset closer and said, “I’ll be right there.”
That was just the latest fire that Reetz, co-chairperson of Taste of Tribeca, had to fight in the hours, days and months leading up to the event. As an organizer of a fundraiser that brings in more than $100,000 for P.S. 150 and P.S. 234, Reetz planned Taste of Tribeca like it was her full-time job.
She and Wendy Chapman, the other co-chairperson, put in 40 hours a week, often into the wee hours of the morning, managing the 22 committees that make Taste of Tribeca possible. They lined up more than 50 Downtown restaurants and twice as many corporate sponsors. They sold 3,000 tickets to locals and foodies from around the city and beyond.
For Lower Manhattan public schools, P.T.A. fundraising makes the difference between students having art classes, music lessons, author visits and field trips — and not having them. With budgets measured in the tens of thousands of dollars, the P.T.A.s have to do far more than just hold bake sales. And that means that P.T.A. members have to do more than bake cookies.
If parents want to attract big spenders, they have to run their major fundraisers as smoothly as corporate events. Taste of Tribeca, one of the largest P.T.A. fundraisers Downtown, has its own Web site, logo, merchandise and registered nonprofit status. More than 300 parents volunteer for the event, doing everything from designing the T-shirts to signing up corporate sponsors. A public relations firm volunteers its services to manage the event’s image and media attention.
And Chapman and Reetz coordinate all of it, doing most of the work while their children are at school, or late at night after their children go to sleep. Chapman has two daughters and a son, and Reetz has two daughters. Both are stay-at-home moms.
“I’ve never worked this hard,” Reetz said after a recent P.T.A. meeting. She has worked in banking and magazine publishing, but the pressure of putting on a large-scale outdoor event, a feat of coordination with hundreds of people and several city agencies, is a different kind of challenge.
Chapman said some of the work is fun, and she likes getting to know other parents. “It’s easy to do it when you see what the benefit is,” she said.
On Saturday, Reetz and Chapman saw the results of their long hours. Without the predicted rain, the Downtown community flooded Taste of Tribeca, packing Duane and Greenwich Sts. with strollers, sampling food from Downtown’s most popular restaurants. It was a hometown event, with face-painted children clutching balloons and parents dancing with their children in front of the band. Seniors sat in the shade to sample their food, while students from Stuyvesant High School shuttled trays of delicacies to tables of sponsors.
Weaving in and out of the crowd, Reetz and Chapman tag-teamed to deal with each pressing issue as it unfolded, keeping the event moving and the customers satisfied.
Reetz confronted the rogue hotdog vendor, who set up just inside the festival’s boundary at Staple and Duane Sts. He was wearing a Taste of Tribeca staff T-shirt, which he hurriedly took off as Reetz glowered. After a brief dispute, he agreed to move.
Chapman strode through the gathering crowds, thanking restaurants for donating their time, food and expertise, not pausing long enough to accept the proffered samples.
“I’m like a bride who doesn’t get to eat her own food at her wedding,” Chapman joked.
She was worrying over details — posters and markers cluttered the tables reserved for the biggest sponsors, and the racks of Taste T-shirts were too sparsely stocked — then all at once she looked up at the cloudless blue sky and smiled.
“We’re going to make a lot of money today,” she said. “It’s always hectic, but nothing bad — the weather makes everything alright.”
Organizers were still tallying the credit card receipts this week. Last year on a rainy day they made $120,000, which was split evenly between the two Tribeca schools.
Offsetting budget cuts
Taste of Tribeca has grown in size and reputation over the last 14 years, to the point where many attendees don’t even realize that the food festival benefits local schools.
Judy LaBelle and Kathy Bachman were Downtown for their New York University Law School class of 1978 reunion, when they stumbled on the colorful tents and aromas. When told where the money goes, LaBelle turned to Bachman and said, “That made me feel better about spending $45 on lunch.”
LaBelle lives Uptown and doesn’t often come to Tribeca. After sampling the food at several restaurants, she said she’d be back.
For the organizers, though, the focus remains on the schools. They tie Taste of Tribeca’s growth to the schools’ increasing need for the money.
“We are a different neighborhood now,” Chapman said. “The overcrowding situation puts more pressure on us to raise money for the school.”
This year, the schools also have to contend with the city’s threatened budget cuts, which would take a slice out of programs already strapped for cash. That just motivates the parents to work harder.
Carin Barbanel, who coordinates fundraising at P.S. 89, states the situation bluntly.
“We raise $100,000 a year or the school can’t function,” she said. “This year, the target is $150,000 because of the budget cuts. It’s been brutal.”
The P.T.A. at P.S. 89 pays for art and music teachers, the after-school program and the library, which is partially staffed by parent volunteers. To raise the money, parents organize events small and large, from bake sales that net hundreds of dollars to an auction last month that brought in $60,000 in one night.
An event of that magnitude takes time to arrange. Barbanel said she and the three other main organizers of the auction worked almost non-stop. In the weeks leading up to the auction, “one woman’s husband ate cornflakes 50 percent of the time,” Barbanel said. “The kids hate it, they ask you to stop, and families suffer.”
The parents try to rotate the most time-intensive positions among them. Next year, Barbanel’s 17-year-old daughter will be looking at colleges, so Barbanel plans to take on a smaller role, and it will be someone else’s turn to step up.
And as for whether it’s worth all the time and energy, Barbanel has no hesitations.
“That’s the kicker: We love our kids,” she said. “We put our money and work where our mouths are: for our children.”
The parents put their expertise from current or previous jobs into the planning. Barbanel, now a stay-at-home mom, worked in marketing. Other mothers were investment bankers or had high-level executive positions — a perfect background for negotiating corporate sponsorships.
Liz Pappas, a past president of the P.S. 89 P.T.A., is a stay-at-home mom who has worked in public relations for major fashion brands like Chanel and Donna Karan. The fashion world may be crazy, but the P.T.A. work “is the craziest work I’ve ever done in my life,” Pappas said. “It is extremely long hours, with a very high stress level. It is a very, very difficult job.”
At least at her fashion jobs, Pappas said, she might get a free outfit, or overtime pay, or a chance to see a runway show. The P.T.A. work has other benefits, though. Parents bond over the long hours and become friends. After pulling off a large carnival fundraiser several years ago, Pappas invited the other parents back to her apartment, where they grabbed a drink, kicked off their shoes and belted “I Will Survive.”
Planning Taste
The week before Taste of Tribeca, on a cold, rainy morning — the type of day that is any outdoor event organizer’s worst nightmare — the 20 leaders of Taste of Tribeca met in Chapman’s Greenwich St. apartment. They came to the 9 a.m. meeting after dropping their children off at school and sat sipping coffee, munching muffins and scrolling through e-mails on their blackberries.
The to-do list was overwhelming. The tickets needed to be sold, hundreds of flyers distributed, posters and banners hung. The map of food vendors needed proofreading — “Every time I look at it, I find another typo,” Chapman said. And did anyone mention the thank you notes?
It was Fri., May 9 and Taste of Tribeca was eight days away.
As Chapman began ticking through the list of things that needed to happen immediately, she interrupted herself.
“How many people have to leave right away?” she asked.
Nearly half the parents raised their hands. They are a busy bunch, mostly moms but some dads, too, and many have full-time jobs.
No matter how much planning they do, there are some things the co-chairs cannot control, and at the top of that list is the weather.
“We need sunny weather to sell lots of tickets on Monday and Tuesday,” Chapman said nervously.
“How about sunny weather on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” Reetz suggested.
Everyone nodded vigorously.
As it turned out, Friday, the day before the event, was one of the coldest, windiest, rainiest days of the month. After studying the weather forecast, the co-chairs ordered rain tents. And then Saturday dawned, clear and warm, so the tents were used merely as sun protection. The 3,000 tickets were gone by mid-afternoon, and the organizers finally wrapped up the event, exhausted but satisfied.
As Taste of Tribeca finished, another Downtown school was just getting geared up for its biggest fundraising event of the year. Millennium High School held its spring auction Wednesday evening with a fundraising goal of $30,000.
Christina Benitan, an organizer of the event, joined the Millennium P.T.A. when her daughter started high school four years ago. She was nervous about the transition and wanted to have a presence in the school and get to know the teachers. Plus her flexible schedule as an actress in TV commercials gave her time to do P.T.A. work during the day.
When Benitan joined, Millennium’s P.T.A. consisted of five parents. It has since grown along with the school and Benitan hopes to have more than $50,000 in the bank for the next school year, which would almost make up for the $57,000 budget cut the school faces.
The P.T.A. money will pay for SAT prep courses, a scholarship, books and supplies and the school Web site. The P.T.A. also pays to rent a location for graduation and helps sponsor community service trips to South and Central America.
For Pappas, from P.S. 89, and the hundreds of other P.T.A. members Downtown, it all comes back to what the money means for the kids. Pappas jumped right into the P.T.A. when her daughter, now 8, entered pre-K, and she quickly took a leading role. Her specialty is netting corporate sponsorships, and she gets satisfaction out of the developers giving something back to the community.
“We use our talents, we use our muscle,” she said, “we use whatever we can to get it done.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
