We serve where solidarity is needed most,connected and united.

Our Foundation’s housing work grows from a simple conviction: a decent, dignified home is the ground on which every other kind of flourishing stands. Beginning in 2016, Jenny and Bob partnered with Habitat for Humanity of Central Arizona and Guatemala, New Course, Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, and experts from the Clinton Global Initiative to launch “Sustainable Neighborhoods for Wellbeing and Happiness” — a commitment to build not just houses but whole green-built, affordable neighborhoods, first in Tempe and then in Latin America.

The vision scaled from a goal of more than 100 sustainable affordable homes toward sustainable neighborhoods entire. As Tempe Community Action Agency’s leadership put it, the partners could work together to transform the community while respecting its existing fabric. In Guatemala, alongside Habitat para la Humanidad, the work reached families in Santa Lucía, Milpas Altas, and Santo Domingo Xenacoj.

Since the catastrophic earthquake, the Foundation has also walked with Haitian neighbors, joining Habitat for Humanity International in a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action to help rebuild. The through-line never changes: healthy, green homes for the families the market leaves behind.

For decades Bob has been part of Central Arizona Shelter Services — CASS — through all its years of ministry and solidarity with what the Foundation calls our street neighbors. As a retired member of the CASS board, he and Jenny have been among its longest-serving volunteers and highest private supporters.

Our Foundation helped launch permanent supportive housing in Tempe — first seeded by stimulus funds through the City of Tempe and the United Way — and redirected its ongoing monthly support to Tempe’s I-HELP, the Interfaith Homeless Emergency Lodging Program, which Jenny and Bob co-founded and whose insurance and staffing costs they underwrite.

The commitment is practical and personal: keep the doors open, keep the lights on, and make sure a person with nowhere to sleep has somewhere safe tonight.

Each October 10th the Foundation marks World Homeless Day at Tempe’s rotating homeless shelter, remembering the families, children, seniors, and veterans without homes. On December 21st — the longest and coldest night of the year — it joins the Homeless Persons' Memorial, honoring neighbors lost to the streets.

Among those remembered is Elaine Herzberg, a homeless neighbor who was struck and killed. In her memory, and alongside partners including Circle the City, Dignity Health, and the Human Services Campus, the Foundation helped create a first health-navigation and transportation system for homeless and underserved patients — turning grief into care that reaches many.

Considering how often the underrepresented are also the under-educated, the Foundation has built a wide net of grants, scholarships, fellowships, and endowments. Each year it supports hundreds of students across the Tempe Union, Phoenix Union, and Navajo Mountain high school districts.

At the college level the Foundation offers grants and fellowships to Arizona State University in Justice Studies, Religious Studies, and a research cluster in Gender Studies, and endows scholarships at Life Pacific College named for John Perkins, for African-American students, and Aimee Semple McPherson, for feminist students. It also serves Fuller Theological Seminary and Tempe College Connect, and Jenny and Bob are founding supporters of the Thomas J. Pappas schools for children experiencing homelessness.

Bob and the Honorable Art Hamilton — former Arizona State Legislator and House Minority Leader — grew up together in the same Phoenix neighborhood, and have never stopped serving the young friends who come from it.

Through the Bob Ramsey–Art Hamilton Fund, in concert with the Phoenix Union High School Foundation, graduating seniors who also attended Murphy and Murphy 2 are selected and awarded each spring — chosen because they intend to enter fields that serve the underrepresented, carrying the neighborhood’s care forward into the next generation.

All children are our children. For sixty years Jenny and Bob have served UNICEF, which works in more than 150 countries to give children health care, clean water, nutrition, education, and protection from trafficking. They invite friends to offer special help each November 20th, Universal Children’s Day.

Our Foundation also supports Sentebale — Forget-Me-Not — serving vulnerable children in Botswana and Lesotho; the Children’s Health Fund and its mobile units for the nation’s most medically underserved children; and, during the holidays, Angel Tree and the Salvation Army, selecting gifts for the little ones of families in hardship and of inmates. As the daughter of the founder of Advocates for the Disabled, Jenny also lifts up disability-rights advocacy for children with special needs.

The Clinton Global Initiative convenes leaders to turn ideas into action. Through CGI University the Foundation stands with our planet’s youngest leaders — students who make their own Commitments to Action on the challenges they will inherit.

It is of a piece with the Foundation’s wider CGI service: proof that young people, given a little support and a great deal of trust, will build the more just world the rest of us only talk about.

While there is a long history of Latina feminisms both inside and outside the US, these texts and perspectives continue to be marginalized within feminist theory. In addition to incorporating more Latina feminist theory into research, the work of this cluster carries over into teaching.

The Reverend Jenny Norton has provided funding to support an annual Research Cluster at ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research. The Norton endowment is designed to stimulate research on women and gender in any field of inquiry, and receives an award to support its activities, which may include partial or full support for a visiting scholar.

The cluster continues to focus on theories of intersectionality and feminist knowledge within a global and transnational framework — asking what the possibilities and limits of intersectionality are in a global context, how feminists engage citizenship, nationalism, postcoloniality, and globalization, and what theories can provide a path for coalition building across real differences and national borders. Its faculty have included Karen Kuo, Karen Leong, Ann Koblitz, Heather Switzer, and Charles Lee of the School of Social Transformation.

Working with ASU’s Professor Joel Gereboff, ASU’s Hillel Director Emeritus Rabbi Barton Lee, and the Arava Institute’s Director David Lehrer, Jenny and Bob scholarship students from ASU’s Religious Studies Department to study at the premier environmental research facility of our planet — the Arava Institute of Ben Gurion University, located within the Negev of Israel.

The scholarship is named in honor of the Reverend Jenny Norton, who received her B.S. in Justice Studies with a minor in Religious Studies in 1993 from Arizona State University and completed her graduate work at Fuller Theological Seminary. After denominational ordination she served as assistant pastor and was appointed an auxiliary chaplain at the Arizona State Department of Corrections, continuing the work of her father, Ralph Norton, in Arizona’s state prisons. The fund is established as an outgrowth of, and a commitment to, that ideal.

The scholarship is awarded each year to a School of Sustainability undergraduate major at the sophomore level or higher — a student interested in how populations facing poverty and social justice issues may benefit from sustainability practices, and who may have ideas worthy of documenting and sharing to help society at large.

Norton and Ramsey are deeply committed to the environment and to related causes such as building LEED homes for Habitat for Humanity. As a former legislator, Norton was instrumental in many environmental initiatives in Arizona, including the Central Arizona Project and the use of alternative fuels.

The Jenny Norton Humanities and Sustainability Lecture has brought voices such as Jamie Bechtel, Co-Founder and CEO of New Course — a marine biologist, environmental lawyer, and chief executive — to speak on “Women, the Environment and Meaningful Change,” on the crucial role that listening plays in fostering solutions in the natural and human worlds, and on driving global change by engaging the people whose voices too often go unheard: women.

Its work reveals intersecting forms of injustice: inequalities built into social life and public policy, based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and legal status, further shaped by political realignments, economic globalization, and technological and cultural change.

It engages multiple visions of justice, working with practitioners, decision makers, and other social change agents to identify sustainable solutions to difficult social problems. And it transforms pathways to justice, as vulnerable, exploited, or marginalized communities draw on local and global resources to resist inequality and create resilient, thriving communities.

The program offers certificate programs including the Certified Public Manager, the Tribal Certified Public Manager, the Arizona Municipal Clerks Institute, the Fire Service Institute, and a Certificate in Public Administration for International Leaders.

More at ramseyexecutive.asu.edu.

Together they are creating entire neighborhoods of healthy, sustainable, affordable houses in Victory Acres, Tempe, as well as in Santo Domingo Xenacoj, Santa Lucia Milpas Altas, and Santa Lucia Utatlán in Guatemala.

Bob describes himself as a Quaker and an eighth-generation abolitionist, and the Foundation’s civil-rights work begins with truth-telling. Hearing First Lady Michelle Obama speak of waking in a house built by slaves, he identified: his own beloved Tempe was settled and built by its Mexican-American community, whose history had been made nearly invisible.

During the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, the Foundation’s team gathered for a Juneteenth field-activism and debrief retreat and created a mission for Black and Indigenous (BIPOC) reparations, focused on the feminine. Launched with scalable activism, the work was dedicated first to Tempe, Phoenix, Tulsa, and New York City.

It asks little of those who join except the most powerful thing they have: their own words, memories, and stories — of Emmett Till, of Rosa Parks, of the family friends who worked the streets and the fields — so that the need for repair cannot be unseen.

Tempe Community Action Agency’s main center on Apache Boulevard was first named the Norton and Ramsey Center, honoring long-time activists Jenny Norton — whose mother helped found TCAA alongside Señora Lupe Esquer — and her husband Bob Ramsey.

In an act of reparation and truth, the center was renamed the Esquer and Ramsey Center, restoring Lupe Esquer’s rightful place in its origins. With this new dedication to her mother’s dear friend Lupe, Jenny said, her pride only swells. The City of Tempe, a pioneer in municipally funding human services, made the moment possible.

Jenny’s hope is simple and unfinished: full equality, participation, and representation for girls and women. It runs through the Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative work on equality for women and through its scholarships for feminist students.

At Arizona State University the Foundation endows a research cluster in Gender Studies, and at Life Pacific College it is developing the Aimee Semple McPherson Scholarship into a fuller Aimee Semple McPherson Center for Social Justice — turning a hope into an institution that will outlast its founders.

Health justice is the Foundation’s heartbeat. From its beginning it has backed community-based solutions for the at-risk, disenfranchised, and vulnerable — in EMS, in behavioral health, and in the everyday medical needs the uninsured too often go without.

Within the medical community the Foundation has been centered for decades in emergency crises. In the Covid crisis it provided PPE, electronic inoculation records, defibrillators, and medicines for emergency use — the same instinct applied to a new emergency: meet people where the danger is.

Our Foundation was originally chartered, decades ago, specifically for rural Arizona and our Reservations — to bring grants, financial assistance, and healthcare projects to communities the system too easily forgets.

That founding charge still shapes everything after it: assistance for the education and training of emergency-service and healthcare workers, and support for community-based care for at-risk and vulnerable populations, so that a person’s zip code or reservation does not decide whether they live.

Trauma care is a discipline that improves fastest when its practitioners learn from one another across borders. The Korea–Arizona Trauma Summit brings together emergency-medicine and trauma-care leadership from Korea and Arizona to share what each has learned about saving the critically injured.

It reflects a conviction at the core of the Foundation’s EMS work: that better systems, measured honestly and shared generously, mean more people go home to their families.

A nationally recognized leader in emergency medical systems, Bob Ramsey — with Arizona’s EMS leadership — helped pioneer regionalized systems of care built on a simple promise: get the right patient to the right hospital in the right time frame.

By matching a patient’s specific emergency to the appropriate prehospital treatment, transport, and hospital — for traumatic injury, ST-elevation heart attack (STEMI), acute stroke, and cardiac arrest — and by measuring outcomes honestly and improving continuously, these systems measurably raised survival, helping establish “Heart Safe Cities” that beat national averages several times over.

Bob likens EMS to a tree: leadership as the trunk, alert and agile and responsive, and the limbs as partners — fire and public-safety agencies, hospitals, elected officials — so that the fruit, the best possible outcome for the patient, can ripen and reseed. His lifetime of this work was honored with a healthcare Lifetime Achievement Award.

Our Foundation has put lifesaving equipment directly into the hands of communities. It has donated more than 150 automated external defibrillators (AEDs) to community centers and public-safety agencies for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest — a response to a plain fact: in a single year, sudden cardiac arrest claimed some 450,000 American lives.

It has also sent more than 120 ambulances, along with medical equipment and supplies, to communities across Mexico, Haiti, Guadalajara, and the Dominican Republic — including an ambulance to Carlos Santana’s community health center in Jalisco — and sponsors bilingual water-safety programs for children across Arizona.

Behind every rescue is someone who was trained to make it. From its founding the Foundation has provided assistance for the education and training of emergency-service and healthcare workers, and for CPR and public education that turns bystanders into first responders.

Bob’s own life built the scaffolding for this: founder and director of EMS response systems, chair of the writing of Arizona’s ambulance-service rules on the Governor’s EMS Council, and an appointee to the Governor’s 9/11 Memorial Commission. Our Foundation carries that expertise forward in support of the paramedics and first responders who answer the call.

The scholarship was established in partnership with Jewish National Fund National President Russell Robinson and the late Arizona JNF board member Nelson Lerner, working alongside Arizona State University’s Professor Joel Gereboff, the ASU Foundation’s Jill DeMichele, and Ben Gurion University’s Arava Institute Executive Director Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed and Professor David Lehrer.

Former Tree of Life recipients, Jenny and Bob endow it so that ASU students may carry their study of religion into the study of the earth — where the two have never been separate.

The honor carried a long inheritance. Jenny’s father, Ralph Silbert Norton, had been a correspondent and pen pal of David Ben Gurion, and a supporter of the Jewish National Fund since 1948 — the year of the founding itself.

Jenny visited with the JNF guests about sharing moments.

The award commemorates the life and accomplishments of Mr. Brooks, the first Jewish Mayor of Mesa. It was established to pay tribute to those whose humanitarian concern and activism exemplify the life of the Mayor and the principles of the Anti-Defamation League.

The work of remembering runs through this Foundation. You can read more about JewishGen, and about the family graves and the stones and prayers laid upon them, in our hub Visiting and Connecting with History.

A rooftop view of the wondrous city of Jerusalem, with Bob Ramsey, while celebrating Jenny Norton’s seventieth birthday.

It was a glorious privilege to celebrate Seder in Jerusalem, at the beautiful home of Gitty and Eli Beer and their lovely family. Eli is the Founder and CEO of United Hatzalah.

After spending her birthday at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum, Gene Luntz — who arranged a meaningful and honoring personal tour for the family — presented Jenny with a first edition of the child Pavel Friedmann’s tragically beautiful book, …I never saw another butterfly…

Born in 1945 to a cantor-trained Jewish college professor father and a Salvation Army Protestant social worker mother, Jenny met Bob at seventeen — having heard of the ninth-generation Quaker who was President of the Fellowship of Christians and Jews and President of his high school class. They have spent a loving lifetime together, working to serve the underrepresented.

When I was four, Grandmother Silbert offered to take me with her shopping downtown. We boarded the bus, my little hand in hers, and we took a seat. A passenger across the aisle scowled at us and said, “Christ-killer.” Grandma tightened her grip on my hand and moved us to the back of the bus, where she nestled me closer in protection.

When I was eight, I spent summer camp at our Jewish Community Center learning to swim and to sew, in those glorious summer days.

The following autumn, still eight years old, the children of our little church’s choir director — choir director! — called me the k-word. I won’t say it nor write it. Concurrently that autumn, two neighbor children who were my grammar school classmates told me that their parents would not let me play with them because “you killed Jesus,” they said.

My beautifully integrated high school and college years were free of any antisemitism. But then, at one of my early jobs in my early twenties, a work colleague announced to a group of us that she was offered a promotion and a transfer to Florida. “How wonderful,” I said. “Too many Jews,” she responded. “But you know that I’m Jewish,” I said. “Oh, but you’re not one of those New York Jews,” she scolded. “I am — I was born in New York,” was my response as I left the room, hearing another colleague cruelly call out, “Jenny, there weren’t enough ovens.”

I resigned. And then I went to work in an inclusive job, starting an inclusive career — a loving career in social justice, in appointed and elected policy-making, and in directing a charitable foundation — welcoming indivisibility, with liberty and justice for all.

Rev. Jenny Lloyd Norton

Rev. Jenny Norton is a denominationally endorsed prison and hospital chaplain. She served eighteen years as auxiliary chaplain for the Arizona State Department of Corrections, walking alongside the least among us confined in jail.

The keystone of her ministry was at Tempe St. Luke’s Hospital, where she organized an indigent pastoral-care fund for homeless patients discharged to the streets, a voucher program to provide prescribed medications upon discharge, and free mammograms for the underinsured, uninsured, and undocumented — a chaplaincy measured not only in prayer but in prescriptions filled and lives caught before they fell.

Memory is its own ministry. On a reflective birthday visit, with the help of dear friends, Jenny found the resting places of her grandmother Molly and her great-grandparents Jacob and Fannie — offering prayers and Kaddish, and planning the groundskeeping of their graves.

In the Jewish tradition the family places stones with prayers at each grave, and is planning a Silbert Family Memorial Bench with Montefiore’s head groundskeeper. Our Foundation invites friends to support JewishGen and the work of remembering — because to honor those who came before is to know who we are.

Our Foundation ties care for the Earth to justice for the people who suffer most when she is harmed. Its environmental work reaches from green-built, LEED-certified affordable housing to research on how communities facing poverty and injustice can benefit most from sustainable practice.

Working with Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and, in the Negev, the Arava Institute, and through the CGI America “Sustainable Neighborhoods for Wellbeing and Happiness” Commitment to Action, the Foundation treats a healthy planet not as a luxury but as a birthright owed to every child.

Established in 2009 with a gift from Jenny Norton and Bob Ramsey, the Norton and Ramsey Sustainability Scholarship was the very first endowment for undergraduate students at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability.

Awarded each fall to a School of Sustainability major at the sophomore level or above, it goes to a student interested in how populations facing poverty and social-justice issues can benefit from sustainability practices — funding, year after year, the scholars who will help keep Mother Earth livable for those with the least.

Social justice through music is an old and honest tradition, and the Foundation keeps it alive. When Bob visited Carlos Santana, the Foundation sent an ambulance — one of many worldwide — to Santana’s Centro Comunitario de Salud in Jalisco: un regalo por los niños, a gift for the children.

Our Foundation supports the David Lynch Foundation and its work bringing stillness to those under stress, and offers a scholarship to encourage a young musician to learn and carry forward the lost language of folk music. As the labor organizer Joe Hill observed, a folk song can be learned by heart and repeated over and over, while a pamphlet is read only once.

Announced from Atlanta on November 8, 2011, the offer directed every dollar from sales of the song through January 2012 to Habitat’s work in Haiti. Speaking of why he gave it, Nash said we must “share the love” with those who have no good fortune of their own.

A two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — with the British pop group The Hollies, and with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — Nash was thanked by Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, who noted the great need in Haiti and how each purchase would help families rebuild their lives after the January 2010 earthquake.

Habitat had set a five-year goal of serving 50,000 families through 2015. Its earthquake recovery program — emergency shelter kits, structural damage assessments, repairs and rehabilitations, and transitional and upgradable shelters — had by then reached more than 28,000 families, roughly 140,000 people. That same month, five hundred volunteers traveled to Haiti to raise 100 houses in Léogâne during Habitat’s 28th annual Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, with another hundred to follow the next year.

We warmly invite you to visit grahamnash.com — to take part in his causes, and to explore his book.