New Hampshire REALTORS President Gerry O'Connell wouldn't have been making the late-night trek across southern New Hampshire for an overnight and 8 a.m. presentation for just anyone.
And he wasn’t.
The force of nature known to many in the Jaffrey-Ringe area as Tonya Albee, a Realtor with Group One Realty, was to receive the 2018 New NHAR Good Neighbor award on November 8 at the weekly meeting of the Jaffrey-Rindge Rotary Club. O’Connell wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to personally hand her the Good Neighbor pin, Pepi Hermann crystal and, most significantly, a $5,000 check to the summer camp she created eight years ago and now runs, BEST.
“Days like this are why I sought out this position in the first place,” President O’Connell would later say. “Tonya Albee is exactly the kind of Realtor that we want to highlight, and I couldn’t be more proud that I was able to convey our thanks to her as an association.”
The Good Neighbor program was introduced to NHAR in 2003 to annually recognize one or two Realtors who make exceptional contributions to improve the quality of life in their communities.
Recipients have been recognized for a wide variety of efforts within their communities, with the common bond being their heartfelt desire to help, to reach well beyond their own personal interests, to make their communities better places to live – the very core of the stated Realtor ideals.
As the Good Neighbor working group quickly recognized, Albee was the perfect fit for that description.
Even beyond the fact that she was the founder of the free enrichment camp some eight years ago, and beyond the more than 600 hours she has personally donated and more than 4,000 hours she has recruited over the last year alone, the wide-ranging impact the program has had made a serious impression on the working group members, who were charged with selecting the winner among a strong field of nearly a dozen applicants.
Camp BEST (Best Ever Summer Time) serves upward of 90 otherwise underserved Jaffrey and Rindge middle school children at no cost each summer; it increases academic outcomes in a vast majority of those campers; and in general it provides a safe and nurturing environment for those who need it the most – mentoring, feeding and teaching these young people during July of each year.
As one camper’s parent wrote, “QUEST is the miracle that happened for my daughter. I hope that this wonderful program continues for years to come and brings the ‘smart’ out of kids like it did for mine.”
And perhaps the highest praise of all has come from Robert Putnam, a professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”
Wrote Putnam, “A grave social and moral challenge facing America today is the growing opportunity gap between kids from well-off backgrounds and kids from less-well-off backgrounds. … The [BEST] Summer Camp Program is among the most promising efforts I know anywhere in the country to address the opportunity gap.”
In his remarks, O’Connell was quick to point out that the work couldn’t have possibly been done by Albee alone, and he cited the many volunteers who make the program possible: those in the Jaffrey-Rindge Rotary Club, as well as the Jaffrey-Rindge School District and Franklin Pierce University.
But he also acknowledged a simple fact, one that is openly understood by all of those who have had a hand in the program’s success: Without Tonya Albee, there would be no Camp BEST, and hundreds of potentially at-risk middle schoolers in southern New Hampshire would have one less alternative during the critical summer months.
“It’s called the Good Neighbor award for a reason,” O’Connell said. “We often talk about how Realtors are community-builders in the literal sense, and there’s no greater example of that than Tonya Albee.”