If somebody tried to burn your house down—not once, but twice in the last eight years—you might think that the neighborhood was not a good match for you, right?

Rob Castañeda and his wife, Amy, don’t feel that way. They have faced gang violence, literally at their front door, and after 10 years, remain ensconced in their two-story home in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, home to the largest Mexican-American population in the Midwest and the East-West dividing line between two gangs, the Latin Kings and the Two-Six.

So why is this 34-year-old couple still living in Little Village? Mostly, says Rob, it was time to take a stand. “Most of the people who live in these [types of] communities are honest, hard-working people who live in fear—so they just turn their heads,” says Rob. “My head doesn’t turn very easily.”

No kidding. Castañeda, a third-generation Mexican-American, discovered early on that he could be a force for change in his gang-riven community—simply by staying put and using his coaching skills (and a school basketball court) to teach the neighborhood’s youth a new way to interact. Today, some seven years later, that determination has evolved into Beyond the Ball, a local nonprofit he started in 2006 with his wife to prepare urban youth to be community leaders through athletic programs, tutoring, mentoring, and youth leadership training.

But getting to that point has been a difficult—and often dangerous—journey. It all began in December 1998, when Rob and Amy moved into the neighborhood so Amy could start teaching at one of the local schools. Both had grown up locally, Rob in marginalized South Chicago and Amy in working-class McKinley Park, about a half-mile from Little Village. They were high school sweethearts and went to college together in South Carolina. In 1996, they were wed.

“The first year that we lived [in Little Village], almost every day, sometimes twice a day, there could be between three and 20 guys hanging out in front of our house,” Rob recalls. “These guys could be shooting, or throwing bottles at cars. They were trying to draw out rival gang members driving down the street.”

Then, one January night in 2000, Rob was awakened by the sound of gunfire and called the police. Just before they arrived, Castañeda saw one of the gang members hide a gun behind the license plate of a nearby car and run off. Watching from the house, Castañeda became frustrated waiting for the officers to find the weapon and so opened his door, went out to the street, and showed them where to look.

Gang retribution came swiftly. Several nights later, the Castañeda’s porch was set ablaze, and Rob had to put it out, himself, with a towel. Later that night, Rob recalls, the couple discussed moving to the suburbs. But they changed their minds the next day when members of the girl’s basketball team visited the house and begged them to stay. One girl told Amy: “You’ can’t leave, because if you do, who’s going to help us?”

Two weeks later, though, it happened again. Gang members threw a Molotov cocktail through the Castañeda’s front window, setting their porch and front door ablaze once more. But this time, Rob and Amy decided to fight back. The fire department came to extinguish the fire; the Castañedas alerted the media, the local police set up a security detail and, ultimately, neighbors organized a march through the neighborhood.

The day of the march, the principal of a neighborhood middle school (located near the geographical dividing line separating one gang territory from the other) met the couple, and later that summer offered Amy a job teaching art at his school. Rob inquired about coaching in the fall, and was accepted. For the next few months, Rob worked to quell the gang activity against heavy odds. Sometimes, he recalls, students would ask to stay late—just so they could avoid being confronted by gang “recruiters” on their way home from school. Making matters worse? There was no indoor basketball court, no safe place where players could simply be themselves and focus on the game.

Then Rob got an idea. He persuaded the school principal to open the school gym on Saturdays and began hosting pick-up games there. Soon, players began asking Rob if they could add their brother or cousin or friends to the teams, and before long, Castañeda’s Saturday games were attracting up to 70 players of all ages, races, and gang allegiances. Eventually, he formed a neighborhood basketball league. As of this past summer, the league had four divisions and 196 players—male and female.

But managing it all wasn’t easy. “Sometimes,” Castañeda said, “we’d have guys who would come into the gym and try to get up in people’s faces to talk about gang stuff, but just as often, somebody would say to them, ‘You can’t do that stuff in here, you have to leave it outside.’” Recalls Rob: “[The players] had started forming these amazing relationships. [We had] black players and Latino players and in five years, there was not one fight.”

Little Village still has gang problems but not like the ones it had when the Castañedas moved in. “[Some of] these guys are coming to my house now. We’re watching basketball games on my TV, we’re eating dinner together. [Beyond the Ball] isn’t just a program anymore. It’s our way of life,” he says.

Just ask Amy Castañeda’s mother, Connie Puga. “Without Rob and Amy,” she says, “these [neighborhood] kids would have nothing”—proof, again, that it takes a village. Literally.

Richard Stadin has what you might call a recession-proof philanthropy. He literally grows most of what he gives—in this case, some six gardens across New York City, specially nurtured to attract butterflies to the plants within.

Stadin’s interest in butterflies began more than a decade ago when he met Jim Ebner, a retired Milwaukee schoolteacher and lepidopterist¬–a zoologist who studies butterflies. The two met at a trade show, one of many that the 74-year-old Stadin attends as president of his Manhattan-based company, Mastervision, which produces and sells cultural and educational videos.

In 1996, Ebner and Stadin created a film for The Audubon Society about butterflies for beginners and gardeners; one fall day several years later, Stadin was looking off the roof of his New York City co-op on the Upper East Side of Manhattan near Central Park when he saw thousands of Monarch butterflies in flight. “They were migrating ... and their flyway went straight down Park Avenue. It was amazing.”

It was the inspiration he needed to convince the Central Park Conservancy to set aside land for a butterfly garden in Central Park. Within two years, Stadin had purchased and planted buddleia bushes and other plants that attracted butterflies to the garden.

Now the Conservancy helps to water the garden, located in the park’s North Meadow (between East 102nd and 103rd Streets at Fifth Avenue). It’s a nice change from the days when Stadin and a couple of friends had to water the plants themselves, dragging lengths of hose up a hill from a wooden storage shed that the conservancy had built for them some 100 yards away.

But Stadin’s philanthropy began long before he started buying plants and pruning bushes at his garden in Central Park and another at the nearby Ronald McDonald House, a temporary home to families from all over the world who have traveled to the city for pediatric cancer treatment at city hospitals. Stadin’s sense of community responsibility began during his own childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., when he’d collect newspaper and aluminum to support America’s World War II efforts. “Any time there was a collection for the war drive,” says Stadin, “I just grabbed my wagon and walked around the neighborhood asking people to help.”

In his later years, as a volunteer at his synagogue (Congregation Or Zarua in Manhattan), Stadin would dress up as Santa Claus around Christmas at the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter’s nonprofit homeless facility. He’d also be on hand as a volunteer during the synagogue’s “pizza nights” at the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter. That work eventually led Stadin to a friendship with Ralph Vogel, the Ronald McDonald House’s director of community service. Stadin built a butterfly garden at the Ronald McDonald house in 2001.

Stadin went on to build more gardens around the city. In all, he has spent some $10,000 to plant and maintain eight butterfly gardens he’s built and tended—four in Central Park, the one at the Ronald McDonald House, and one garden each for the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter, the Rusk Institute at New York University Hospital, and Marine Park in Brooklyn.

Stadin says he enjoys meeting with the children who visit the gardens from spring to fall and often introduces them and their parents to the life cycle of butterflies. He discusses how caterpillars become butterflies; he also explains the seemingly impossible, annual trip that Monarch butterflies make each year as they migrate from Canada to Mexico.

“The kids understand the miracle of [migration], but it is great when the parents do, too,” says Stadin. “Kids have a lot of faith, but the parents need to have hope, especially during the time while their children are sick. The beauty of the experience, the renewal. That’s what blows me away.”

Stadin’s faith also extends to his own giving, especially in these hard economic times. “This economy will not affect what I am doing,” Stadin says. “The gardens are set up. I spend money each year replacing some plants, but they are perennials”—just like his giving and just like the gardens and good will that he grows.

Seven years after the September 11th tragedy at the World Trade Center, dozens of nonprofit organizations devoted to helping the victims of that terrorist attack are cutting staff or closing down as the dollars they depended on are drying up. The American Red Cross’ billion-dollar Liberty Disaster Relief Fund, set up on September 20, 2001, to help 9/11 victims, for example, made its last payouts in June. With just two people remaining on a staff that had once numbered 300, the fund is likely to close by the end of this year.

But one group to rise out of the grief of that day—The New York Says Thank You Foundation—is growing. With just one unpaid staff member and a 2008 budget of $100,000, the nonprofit sends volunteers from New York City to communities around the country struck by disaster—essentially, says 42-year-old founder Jeff Parness, to show gratitude to non-New Yorkers who helped 9/11 families and others in their time of need seven years ago.

Parness’ group is expanding its donor list, too. Last year, New York City school children donated $10,000 to Parness’ group through Penny Harvest (a multi-state program that administers donations as grants to various nonprofits) and other fundraising efforts at The Rodeph Sholom School. Other donors have included The Association for a Better New York (ABNY) Foundation, chaired by New York real estate mogul Bill Rudin, and Manhattan businessmen and philanthropists Jonathan Tisch, Larry Silverstein, and others. Corporate support this year has come from Newmark Knight Frank, KPMG, CB Richard Ellis, and B.R. Guest, among others, as well as from the employees of Merrill Lynch and Accenture.

“We’re FINALLY on the radar screen!,” says Parness. No kidding: Parness says the nonprofit’s budget has risen from $6,000 in 2003 to $100,000 this year; the number of volunteers has grown from 14 to more than 300 during the same period. “We’re growing because we’re not about 9/11 … we’re about 9/12,” Parness says. “We’re about celebrating humanity and a sense of kindness and neighborliness. We celebrate the strangers who helped New York in its darkest hour, and how we can help them now in their time of need.”

Parness’ personal connection to 9/11 was the loss of one of his business partners, Hagay Shefi, who was speaking at a risk management conference that morning at Windows on the World, the restaurant that had been located on the 107th floor of the north tower of the trade center. Parness, Shefi and two others had worked for VenturiFX at the time, a seed stage venture capital firm. “Hagay’s passing kind of changed my perspective on what was important and what wasn’t,” says Parness. (On that fateful day, Parness did not join his friend because he was at Mt. Sinai hospital, where his 3-month-old son, Josh, had an appointment with a kidney specialist.)

Parness agonized a lot in the days and weeks that followed the attacks. But it wasn’t until a day in November 2003, slightly more than two years later, when he came up with the idea for his nonprofit while watching an evening news report on CNN with his five-year-old son, Evan, about wildfires in San Diego that had destroyed more than 3,300 homes. “Evan looked at me with an incredibly serious face,” Parness recalls, “and asked me if we could send a bunch of old toys to his Aunt Molly in San Diego—so that she could deliver them to shelters for those made homeless by the fires.”

Parness challenged his son, saying “what if you could collect toys from everyone in the building?” His son agreed and said. “Well, then we have to ask them, don’t we?” Parness thought: That’s it—people from all over the country sent us stuff after 9/11…it was time to pass it all forward somehow. He spoke with a few friends, told them about his idea and said, “I’m driving to California to help these survivors—are you in?”

That night, Parness wasted no time contacting every family in his entire 35-story Upper West Side building who had signed up to accept trick-or-treaters the night before for the building’s Halloween event. Within 10 minutes, Parness says, toys began appearing at his door and in the lobby. By the next morning, Parness and more than 100 volunteers—from neighbors and schoolmates to firefighters and local shopkeepers—had collected clothing, flashlights, batteries, and used toys to load onto a 17-foot truck, which Parness and two friends then drove from Manhattan to San Diego, stopping in seven states along the way. The truck, emblazoned with a sign that read, “New Yorkers Support Southern California Fire Victims with Cross-Country Relief Drive,” left New York one-third full, but by the time it got to San Diego, was filled to the brim. At a Walmart in Washington, Pa., Parness gave a press release about the trip to the store manager, who then handed him the store’s microphone and told him to make his pitch to everyone in the store. Parness left with several $50 gift cards and items donated by shoppers. When they stopped for gas at a Jumping Jimmy’s Citgo in Montrose, Ill., the clerk wanted to give him money, but Parness told her to spend that cash on something from the station’s minimart, like the Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls. At the Shilo Inn hotel in Yuma, Ariz., owner Sandy Potter loaded the truck with towels, sheets, and other supplies. As Parness was leaving, Potter gave him a comforter that had belonged to his grandmother, saying, “Maybe this can comfort someone else now.”

While driving a truck to deliver relief to others is no longer the way the group operates, Parness and his family and volunteers every September choose a devastated city to help and recruit volunteers, both locally and nationally, to go there and help. Parness says he “never did anything community or civic-oriented in [his] life before [this first trip],” but the results—such as building homes and recreation rooms in these devastated cities—have been far-reaching. Just as a news report helped lead them to San Diego, Parness keeps his hand on the TV remote when looking for the next location where NYSTY will travel. “I’ll watch the Weather Channel to keep an eye on small communities around the country, backwater towns that most people have never heard of,” Parness says. The network’s coverage, for example, led them to communities affected by tornados in Utica and Granville, Ill.; in DeGonia Springs and Evansville, Ind.; in Groesbeck, Texas; and Greensburg, Ks. In every city, he says, the volunteers are rebuilding and showing how much New Yorkers care.

Parness has noticed with every trip that his “victims” have become volunteers. “People who we have helped the previous year,” he says, “ask if they can we come with us on this year’s project. They just want to pay it forward.”

Just last week, from September 4-7—this year’s annual recovery/rebuilding trip—NYSTY traveled to Greensburg, Kan., which, in May of 2007, had been 95% destroyed by what remains the strongest tornado in US history. The charity brought 300 volunteers, taking over every hotel room in a 40-mile radius of town. The project: to build a 14,000 square foot 4-H county fairground pavilion, a central gathering place for the families of Greensburg. Among the volunteers: 30 New York City firefighters who survived 9/11, 10 New York City school kids, several first responders to Ground Zero, family members of people who died there, and others. “The list just goes on and on,” says Parness. “We’ve got people who plan this like a vacation every year. It is sort of a weird dysfunctional family, made up of all these disaster survivors, who get together every year to do something positive to help the next community we help.”

Before starting NYSTY, Parness says he had a lot of emotions pent up inside him—trying to figure out how to honor Hagay, wondering how he would be able to teach his sons a positive lesson about how to be a good person. “I kept thinking, what would I ever do in my life to honor Hagay’s memory and to know that my life had changed in some meaningful way since 9/11?” Parness recalls. Other issues that daunted him at the time included how he would teach his sons Evan and Josh a lesson about the importance of helping others. “I wanted to show them that we could do something positive,” Parness says, “not just talk about it, but actually do it.” He hopes his sons will take over the nonprofit long after he’s gone.

“From a personal perspective, this work has taught my kids a really powerful lesson— and it really is the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done,” Parness says. “We’ve helped people who now, even seven years after 9/11, still have a hard time articulating their experiences. And we know that we’re giving them a vehicle to do something positive with their emotions.”

Just ask Tony Baccale, operations supervisor at Merrill Lynch and an NYSTY volunteer—and who watched as the towers fell that morning. ”Being part of New York Says Thank You has helped me to get some closure,” Baccale says. “It doesn’t help me forget what happened on 9/11, because I was right there watching it happen through the windows, but it makes it easier to get through that day”—which, says Parness, is precisely the point.

“We help ourselves by helping others,” he says. “It’s just that simple.”