Back in the 1970s, Phyllis AlRoy set out on a mission to work towards ending world hunger. After more than 40 years of working towards that goal, the Ewing resident has been recognized for her efforts.
In July at the 35th anniversary celebration of RESULTS, a citizens advocacy group working to end hunger and poverty, former Representative Rush Holt presented Ewing resident Phyllis AlRoy with the Bob Dickerson Grassroots Leadership award for her 25 years of dedicated activism with the organization.
Not particularly an activist earlier in her life, AlRoy first volunteered to work against hunger after doing an Erhard Seminar Training program, which focused on personal transformation, in the late 1970s. The national leader of EST, Werner Erhard, had started a hunger project, “Making Hunger a Thing Whose Time Has Come,” that started AlRoy on the road to activism.
“I always had sympathy for the underdog, and it rang a bell with me,” AlRoy said. Once the project got established as an organization, AlRoy signed on as a volunteer.
The RESULTS award comes 30 years after AlRoy’s successful effort to get the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp to raise awareness of the fight to end world hunger.
AlRoy started what turned out to be a two-year effort to lobby U.S. Postmaster General William F. Bolger to issue an “end hunger” postage stamp in 1983.
She began by sending petitions to people around the country on the Hunger Project mailing list and ended up five months later with 100,000 signatures and a pile of petitions that “came up to my chest when stacked,” she said.
When she realized that petitions alone would not be effective, AlRoy asked organizations that focused on hunger as an issue to write to the postmaster general about how helpful it would be to them to have an “end hunger” stamp.
Thirty-three organizations sent letters to the postmaster general, still to no avail. AlRoy then learned that the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee met bimonthly to make decisions about new stamps, so she started sending letters bimonthly to get the stamp on the committee’s agenda.
Going into the home stretch she also stayed in touch with key volunteers, hunger organizations and the staff of the House Select Committee on Hunger. She also successfully requested that her U.S. senator, Bill Bradley, and her representative, Chris Smith, send “dear colleague” letters to all U.S. senators and representatives about the importance of the stamp.
Finally, on Oct. 15, 1985, the first-class 22-cent “end hunger” stamp was issued, and AlRoy’s efforts were recognized in “American Philatelist” in an editorial by Bill Welch about how “one person can make a difference.”
AlRoy learned about RESULTS from her sister, who was a member of the nonprofit organization, which was founded in 1980.
“RESULTS is a movement of passionate, committed everyday people,” says the organization’s website. “Together they use their voices to influence political decisions that will bring an end to poverty.”
RESULTS volunteers receive the training, research, and other supported they need to become skilled advocates who can advise policy makers and guide them toward decisions that improve access to health, education and economic opportunity.
AlRoy went to a meeting of the Central Jersey group after hearing about it from another Hunger Project volunteer. At the meeting, attended by Bill Bradley, they were talking about candlelight vigils to raise awareness of the UNICEF’s World Summit for Children. AlRoy organized a vigil at what was then Trenton State College on Sept. 23, 1990, which Lucinda Floria, wife of Governor Jim Florio, helped lead.
When AlRoy began her work on mothers and children, about 40,000 children under the age of five died every day, and by 2013 that had been reduced to 17,000. RESULTS often focuses on very common-sense issues, like encouraging parents to wash their hands after changing children, or on lower-cost efforts, like establishing clinics instead of hospitals or encouraging breastfeeding.
RESULTS is now lobbying on the Reach Every Mother and Child Act of 2015. Although important headway has been made on hunger, children and pregnant women are still dying, and RESULTS sets up meetings across the aisle to achieve support for what it views as a nonpartisan issue. AlRoy herself has also worked the media end for RESULTS and for the Antipoverty Network of New Jersey.
A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, AlRoy remembers that her father was an activist in the Arthritis Foundation. AlRoy studied marketing at the University of Bridgeport, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, then moved to New York during a recession, where she eventually found a job in advertising.
AlRoy met her husband, Gil Carl AlRoy, in New York. He was a Holocaust survivor who escaped from a Romanian concentration camp, then fought in Israel’s War of Independence. Following a Jewish custom of “changing your name [after experiencing extreme danger] to change your fate, he took the last name “AlRoy,” which is an anglicized version of the Hebrew, “el ro’i, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Early on her husband commuted to Princeton University, where he was a grad student in political science. He moved his family to Princeton when he had a job as a Princeton precept, which required him to live locally.
For 10 years, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, Phyllis AlRoy worked for Astro, a manufacturer of satellites and related systems.
The couple has three children, who all graduated from Princeton High School. The AlRoys moved to Ewing in 1987.
Joanne Carter, executive director of RESULTS, lauded AlRoy for her philanthropy.
“Phyllis has been tireless in her efforts to advocate for education, health care and economic empowerment for people in developing countries, particularly women and children,” she said. “In meeting with members of Congress and their staffs to support legislation and policy changes, as well as generating hundreds of pieces of media, she has powerfully helped to move these goals forward.
“In 1990, 12 million children were dying of essentially preventable causes including malnutrition and diseases such as measles. Today that number is half that, and the goal of actually ending these needless deaths by 2035 has been recently been set by the United States and other countries around the globe.”
By awarding AlRoy for her work, RESULTS has honored AlRoy both as a leader and a social justice advocate in the trenches who does not give up, always pressing on with continuing commitment and without fanfare.
“The thing I got the award for is caring a lot and just doing the next thing and not dropping it and not forgetting about it,” AlRoy said.
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