Amy Bass

Well schooled in volunteerism

by Rhoda Amon
Newsday
May 15, 2004

Her children are grown and on their own. She's closed the books on her careers as a teacher and a PTA mom. So why does Amy Bass still devote so much time and heart to the local schools?

Because, she says, good schools make good communities. "If the school system is excellent, the value of everyone's home increases, and the quality of life improves for all of us."

Two years ago, after 10 years of hard work and numerous conferences, Bass rounded up 20 like-minded volunteers of all ages and launched the Port Washington Education Foundation to provide extra opportunities for students that the cash-short school system couldn't afford. The community organization already has funded 33 projects, varying from an egg hatchery that gives kindergartners an understanding of the cycle of life, to business mentoring for high school seniors.

"Think big. Think outside the box," Bass advises in a call for innovative projects to improve the quality of school life. "We have incredibly high standards. We ask people to really think through a project," Bass says.

At 57, she's become the consummate volunteer leader whom everyone - starting with Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi - thinks of when they think Port Washington.

"Amy is such a role model as a volunteer," says Jennifer Rimmer, executive director of the Residents for a More Beautiful Port Washington, which is honoring Bass at its annual gala June 13 in the Sands Point Village Club. The community beautification organization selected Bass because, says Rimmer, "she's done so many things to keep Port Washington beautiful."

Bass is pleased because the Residents, whose theme this year is Keep Port Clean and Green, plan to partner with the Education Foundation on environmental projects.

"I like to put people together," says Bass, who also is president of the Friends of the Port Washington Public Library, vice president of the Community Chest of Port Washington and vice president of the League of Women Voters of Port Washington-Manhasset, an organization that encourages citizen participation in government. She's a former president of the Port Washington School Board and former recruiting chair for the Boy Scouts of America Troop 241.

She's also fun, say fellow volunteers who have worked with her over the years. She tackles projects with an enthusiasm that's contagious, they say. She also "works so hard and she's a good strategist, very smart," says library director Nancy Curtin.

If Bass is stressed after a day of planning, prodding, organizing fund-raisers and coping with complaints, ending at 1 a.m. at her computer still sending e-mails - she rarely shows it.

Some presidents are content to be caretakers, she says. She counts herself among the "more vigorous, forward-looking presidents," although, she says over breakfast oatmeal in the Haven Diner, all she wanted was to "get back into the community" when she returned with her family to Port Washington, where she grew up.

Until about 19 years ago, she was a frazzled career woman working full-time in Hoboken, N.J., while raising two children and shuttling them back and forth to schools in Manhattan.

Married to a young law student soon after graduating from the University of Rochester in 1968, she taught French in Massachusetts schools while Geoffrey Bass finished at Harvard Law School. When he was drafted a year later and stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, she taught at the Canal Zone College.

While he practiced law in Hoboken, she got a job at the Stevens Institute of Technology and, for the next 11 years, honed her organizational skills running college events and ghostwriting for the college president.

Her last big event, she recalls, was a tribute to a returning "hometown boy," Frank Sinatra, who was given an honorary degree. By that time, she was thinking of returning to her own hometown, where her children, Jonathan and Susanna, could attend the same schools she had, and where her parents, Edith Spivack and Bernard Goldstein, both lawyers, still lived.

Her father died in 1998 at age 90. Her mother, 94, still practices law.

Amy plunged into community work, starting with the PTA. She edited a newsletter for the Residents for a More Beautiful Port Washington. "We like to think that Residents launched her on her extraordinary career of public service," Rimmer said.

Bass has her own version of how it happened. After she sent a donation and a note to the Friends of the Library, she was invited to join. "When you're new in town and willing to work, people gobble you up," she says.

Community volunteers are harder to find in these days of two-career households. Once she collected money door-to- door for charity. These days, no one is home to collect from.

Bass still organizes a phone- a-thon for the Community Chest each year, reaching 400 homes with an appeal for the less fortunate. The Community Chest named her Citizen of the Year in 2000. The Town of North Hempstead listed her on the Women's Roll of Honor. The Youth Council honored her and her husband for their efforts.

Recently, she took on one more chore, becoming coordinator of the 40th reunion of her Schreiber High School Class of '64. She plans to make it the start of a Schreiber Alumni Association. It's another way to serve the schools that, she says, served her well.