Many, if not most, of Otsego County’s non-profit organizations have benefitted financially from Mike Stein’s experience and expertise in fundraising.
Shortly after joining Bassett Hospital in 1982 as its director of human resources, Stein was asked to become their first director of development and public relations. Following his very successful career as Bassett’s in-house fundraiser, Stein has spent the past 20 years working with charitable organizations — helping them to better communicate their missions and to increase their donations.
During lunch at Social Eats in Oneonta, Stein told me he believes, and has seen, that “philanthropy done well can change a community and change lives.” Stein and his wife, Doris, practice what they preach. While having always been generous supporters of the causes that matter to them, they have recently worked with the Community Foundation of Otsego County to establish the Michael Stein and Doris Motta Fund in Support of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion through a bequest of $100,000.
While our current president and his administration treat DEI as the enemy, Stein said he believes that Otsego County needs to attract a younger and more diverse population if it is to thrive. In establishing the fund, Stein was quoted as saying, “ In Otsego County and other rural upstate areas, there is a severe shortage of workers. We are an aging population and we are losing population. We have a fundamental problem that can only be solved by attracting people to our area who may have never considered moving to a remote rural community.” The fund will be used to support local organizations that are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. Stein told me he believes that DEI is not just a moral imperative for Otsego County but it also makes good economic sense.
Stein also serves on the executive committee of the Oneonta-area chapter of the NAACP and I wanted to hear more about what the group is doing during these trying times. “Much of the work we do,” Stein told me, “is done quietly and behind the scenes because it involves confidentiality — advocating for legal redress for people accused of crimes or terminated from employment for what they believe to have been discrimination. We find that sometimes it is discrimination while other times the action was appropriate.”
I asked if the number of incidents of discrimination is increasing locally. “Yes,” Stein answered. “With the president and the people in leadership positions saying things that heretofore were unacceptable to say in public, it gives license to people who may have harbored certain feelings but would not articulate them.” The NAACP, Stein recently explained, is now looking to encourage and help local government, businesses and educational institutions to continue to perpetuate the spirit of inclusivity in the face of pressures from the federal government.
Recent events have also moved Stein to express his concerns through letters and commentary in local news publications. In a recent letter to the editor of The Daily Star, Stein expressed his “outrage at the Trump administration’s cynical exploitation of anti-Semitism as a means to suppress free speech — by conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.” This letter caught my attention. I am a Jew whose grandmother travelled from Bitola, Yugoslavia to America alone at age 19, with the hope that others in her family would be able to eventually follow. They never did. On March 11, 1943, my grandmother’s entire extended family, along with the more than 3,000 Jewish men, women and children living in Bitola, were rounded up by the Nazis and shipped in cattle cars to the Treblinka Concentration Camp in Poland. None survived.
Certainly, I am not anti-Semitic. I am, however, appalled by Israel’s indiscriminate killing of approximately 50,000 Palestinian men, women and children. And, as I write this, families are dying of starvation, with aid to them being blockaded by Israel. “If we allow the administration to redefine dissent as hate speech,” Stein wrote, “we abandon the First Amendment.”
During lunch, we talked about some of the actions of just the past week. The military was ordered to remove all books from their academies which discuss racism or sexism — included are the biographies of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King. President Trump fired the librarian of Congress — who happened to be the first black and the first woman to hold that position — for allowing “inappropriate books.” An executive order directed the federal government to curtail the use of the primary legal tool used to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 13 members of the board of directors of the nation’s Holocaust Museum were fired. These actions, Stein said, make it imperative that we each find our way to speak out.
After lunch, Stein closed our conversation by telling me, “Seeing the dissolution of the country I grew up in is really painful, so I feel I have to do something.” And doing something, he is.