Newmark chairman helps out Chelsea kids.

Jeffrey Gural, the chairman of Newmark, isn't Santa Claus, but he has offered a gift to 40 first-graders who live in the Elliott Houses, a public housing development in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. On December 8, Gural and the "I Have a Dream" Foundation of New York announced a fantastic offer--free after-school programming, extracurricular enrichment, tutoring and mentoring through the 12th grade, along with the promise of assured tuition assistance for higher education upon completion of high school. In return, the first-graders will commit to being "Dreamers"--not dropping out of school, working hard and going to college or vocational school.

This group of Chelsea-Elliott Dreamers will be the 29th adopted by "I Have a Dream" sponsors in New York since 1981. Nationally, the "I Have a Dream" program has helped more than 14,000 students from low-income communities through its long-term program of mentoring, tutoring and tuition assistance. "I Have a Dream" sponsors like Gural make a 10-15 year commitment when they adopt a grade of children from a school or same-age group from a public housing development.

A team of paid staff and volunteers support the Dreamers throughout their primary and secondary school years. In addition to the children's commitment, the involvement of families, school officials, teachers and other community leaders is vital to the program's success.

The new Chelsea-Elliott project is made possible by the contributions of Gural, Howard Kaye, former chairman of Kaye Insurance Associates, Joey Jacobs, Frank Williams and the New York City Housing Authority. Over the next 10 to 14 years, the sponsors will contribute $250,000 annually for the second Chelsea-Elliott project, as well as over $1 million for college scholarships. NYCHA, which has already supported four "I Have a Dream" projects in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, will contribute $50,000 a year to the project.

This will be the second group of students whom Gural and Kaye "adopted" at the Chelsea-Elliott Houses. Next year, the same offer will be made to children of Elliott Houses residents who will be in the first-grade during the 2005-06 school year. In 1993, Gural, Kaye and three other New Yorkers adopted 96 second and third-graders at the public housing site. By this spring, over 85% of those students would have graduated or earned their GED. 81% of the graduates have taken up Gural's promise and enrolled in college.

The Chelsea-Elliott Dreamers, largely from low-income African-American, Hispanic and Asian families, attend P.S. 33 elementary school, where the "I Have a Dream" program will be fully incorporated with their studies and after school activities.

According to Gural, "Both Howard [Kaye] and I are looking forward to adopting a new class of Dreamers and hopefully duplicate the success of the first program.

"We recognize the importance of education in today's hi-tech world and the 'I Have a Dream' program allows us to actually establish a close personal relationship with many of the Dreamers, which makes this quite different from other charities we support where we don't personally know the people we are helping."