On National Mentoring Day, A Reminder To Be An Inspiration
On National Mentoring Day, I want to share this beautiful story from the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Cincinnati.
Anthony Howard thanked his mentor-his Big Brother-in the perfect way. He became a Big Brother himself. Anthony says:
When my mother first signed me up for the program I didn’t think much of it. But today I truly believe that my mother putting me in the program has put me where I am today. My biological brother and I shared a Big Brother, David Spaccarelli, and he impacted both of our lives tremendously. My brother and I lacked a father figure or other male figure in our life to look up to and David became and still is that guy. I started with the program at age 13 and today I am 23, and I still speak to my Big Brother on a regular basis. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas we get together at his parents’ house for dinner. David has helped me during high school and college, and also helped get me the job I have today. 
About a month ago, I decided to start giving back to the program. I now have a Little Brother by the name of Brien. We both share an interest in sports and play basketball and football together. Brien also likes to play video games so our next adventure will be at an arcade center where you can play all the games you want for an hour straight! I am really enjoying being a Big Brother and can already see the impact I am making on this young man’s life.
I would like to say to people who are thinking about joining the program as a “Big” to do it. You don’t know how much you can impact someone’s life ,whether you’re just throwing a football in the backyard with your Little, being that friend to go to lunch with, or just being that someone to talk to. I would like to give a big thank you to David as well as the Big Brother Big Sister program as they have both changed my life in a way that is challenging to express through words.
A Lesson Learned From Ludwig van Beethovan
Challenges and obstacles are a part of living and growing that allow us the opportunity to dig deep within ourselves to find strengths we would never have explored otherwise. Those opportunities are great lessons in this journey that is called life. If we choose to conquer and learn from them, we can grow in so many meaningful ways.
Ludwig van Beethovan, one of history’s most masterful composers, began losing his hearing when he was 26. The next 20 years of his life saw his world become silent. But only to his ears.
Beethovan continued composing, and created some of his most influential pieces – among them, the Ninth Symphony – which is considered one of the greatest works of music ever to have been written.
In an online interview with WQXR, Joseph Straus, author of Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music, spoke about Beethovan. Below are a few excerpts.
“Instead of his deafness stigmatizing the music, it is understood to valorize the music – to make it better or transcendent in some way. The turning point in Beethoven criticism comes from Wagner. To him, Beethoven’s deafness wasn’t a negative thing, it was a positive thing. It permitted him to enter this strange, transcendent realm where he was able to compose this music, cut off from the conventions that constrained composers who could hear.”
Interviewer: Is it dismissive to wonder whether his deafness may have resulted in unintentional results or even hampered his potential?
The consensus these days is “no” — that if the deafness had any impact at all, that it was liberatory, freeing him up to move beyond common compositional conventions of his day. And I think that’s probably accurate in some way. He was no longer able to do practical music-making, such as performing as a pianist, and conducting, and life naturally became more self-contained, hermetic, and isolated. That clearly has an impact on the kind of music he wrote.
…So, what I think I heard Joseph say was that doing things differently did not by any means stifle Beethovan. It only brought out other strengths that caused his talents to go way beyond those of others in his industry. What a great gift!
Cincinnati Volunteer Pete Bushelman Impacts Thousands Through CISE
There are people in this world who generously give of themselves without any want for return. They quietly contribute in ways that touch others in very meaningful ways.
Pete Bushelman is one of those people. Over the past 33 years, he has impacted the lives of thousands of children through is involved with Cincinnati Catholic Inner-City Schools Education Fund (CISE).Single-handedly, he has raised over $2.5 million to give kids from Cincinnati’s urban neighborhoods an excellent education at a CISE school.
Pete has been a member of the CISE Advisory Board since it was formed in 1980 by then Archbishop Joseph Bernardin.
According to Sharon Civitellos, CISE communications coordinator, “Pete is not a figurehead chairperson. On the contrary, he acts as a committee of one and does everything from calling on his raffle ‘customers’ to writing and mailing out thank you cards.”
The first fundraiser undertaken by the CISE Advisory Board was the “Friends of CISE” Raffle. Pete agreed to chair the first Raffle more than 30 years ago and has served in this role ever since.
From late August each year until the day of the Friends of CISE Raffle drawing in December, Pete is on the phone with 800 of his close friends and associates encouraging them to purchase their raffle tickets. Pete’s persistence pays off with more than $120,000 being raised annually for CISE through this one event. Collectively, that amounts to over 1200 raffle tickets sold valued at over $2.5 million!
At over 80 years of age, Pete continues to give his all to making the Friends of CISE Raffle a success. He amazes his colleagues on the CISE Advisory Board with his tenacity and drive to raise funds for the education of children from Cincinnati’s urban neighborhoods. Without Pete’s determined efforts, the future may have been quite different for the young people who received a solid academic and spiritual foundation at the Catholic inner-city schools during the past 33 years and have gone on to college and careers.
Pete’s volunteer work is not limited to CISE. He has dedicated his life to helping others. Any day of the week you might find Pete delivering food to the homeless or a local food pantry, raising funds for one of his other favorite charities, or helping his invalid 
next-door neighbor who has been able to remain in her home thanks to Pete’s care.
Over his lifetime Pete has actively served on over a dozen non-profit boards and continues to look for ways to help those in need.
And Greater Cincinnati is better for all of us because of people like him.
About CISE:
The schools supported by CISE are St. Boniface in Northside, Corryville Catholic, St. Francis Seraph in Over-the-Rhine, St. Francis de Sales in East Walnut Hills, Holy Family in Price Hill, St. Joseph in the West End, St. Lawrence in Price Hill and Resurrection in Price Hill.
To learn more about CISE and how you can help, please visit www.CISEfund.org.
I want to thank Sharon Civitellos for supplying information for this post.
Fuel Cincinnati Fuels Innovative Cincinnati Projects
Have you heard about Fuel Cincinnati? It is is a nonprofit accelerator that identifies and backs innovative community projects in the greater Cincinnati region. Run by an all-volunteer committee of young professionals, for the past six years Fuel (formerly known as Ignite) has been part of Give Back Cincinnati, the region’s largest young professional volunteer organization.
Fuel supports community innovators in a number of ways, including by awarding micro grants of between $250 and $2,000 to nonprofit projects in four core areas: education, community building, diversity, and environment. Fuel Cincinnati has received generous grants from The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile US Bank Foundation and from The Mayerson Family Foundations.
Joe Stewart-Pirone, Fuel chair, sent me information about the ten projects they sparked in 2013. While diverse, what they have in common is their common good for our community. What a great effort!
“Our mission is to identify young professionals with great ideas for improving the community, and then help them take those ideas from the back of a napkin to implementation in a year or less,” Joe said.
Fuel Cincinnati 2013 Projects
Growing Value Nursery
Braden Trauth, design professional and permaculture expert, is a director of Cincinnati-based nonprofit This Land, Inc. He came to Fuel Cincinnati with a proposal to create a retail nursery where the organization could offer both edible plants and 
education on how to grow them sustainably in the local urban environment.
Fuel’s committee fell in love with the idea at first sight. “You talk with Braden for a half hour and you realize that we have these world-class experts on permaculture right here in Cincinnati,” Joe said. “Fuel knew we wanted to help launch this project as soon as we saw it. The focus on sustainability and on addressing the urban food desert problem was timely and exciting.”
Fuel invited This Land to present the idea at its annual Fuel the Fire event in June, where five organizers pitched their project ideas to over a hundred and fifty community members. Each person in the audience paid $20 for the opportunity to listen to the pitches and vote for their favorite, all while enjoying locally brewed beer at the Moerlein Tap Room and food from Cincinnati’s popular Eli’s BBQ.
This Land didn’t take home the $2,000 grant for the top vote-getter at Fuel the Fire, and it didn’t even win the $500 second-place grant. But the organization got to share its idea with dozens of people who had never heard of permaculture before that evening, and Trauth walked away from the event with a number of new connections who were interested in what This Land was doing.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. In August, Trauth met with Fuel Cincinnati to provide an update on the project, and Fuel awarded This Land a $1,200 grant. The Growing Value Nursery is now up and running in Northside.
Against the Grain Scholars
Michael Farrell conceived the idea that did win the most votes – and a $2,000 grant – at Fuel the Fire this year. The Xavier University alumnus and middle school teacher at St. Francis Seraph in Over-the-Rhine saw a gap in the local nonprofit landscape, and he started an organization called Against the Grain Scholars to fill it.
When Mike looked around at the programs serving inner city school students, it seemed to him that most resources aimed to help underachieving students. He felt not enough was being done to support students who were succeeding in that challenging environment.
So he identified three students at his own school whose positive attitude, hard work, and solid achievement set them apart from their peers. Then he lined up young professionals to serve as mentors. He secured donations of tablet computers. He helped the students organize community service projects. And he created opportunities for the students to interact with their mentors. These were the first “Against the Grain Scholars.”
As the first generation of Against the Grain Scholars prepared to move on to high school, Mike came to Fuel Cincinnati for help to keep the project going for a new group of students. Fuel liked the idea and the passion behind it, but in a competitive field of fourteen excellent proposals, Mike’s wasn’t initially one of the five invited to present at Fuel the Fire in June.
But apparently it was number six. Three days before the event, Mike got a call from Fuel.
“One of the other projects dropped out at the last minute,” recalled Joe. “We called Michael in the middle of the committee’s meeting to see if he was interested in the opportunity because we had to make a decision that night.”
Within 48 hours, Mike put together what turned out to be the winning presentation for the event. And after the votes were counted, he took home a $2,000 check to add two new student scholars to the program. “A teacher like Michael is a hero,” said Joe. “He’s a hero to those kids because he’s showing them how to change their lives, and he’s a hero to the community because he’s developing the next generation of young professionals who are going to help keep Cincinnati and our region moving forward.”
Grants and More
Fuel Cincinnati helped launch eight other great ideas in the greater Cincinnati region in 2013. The Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation (http://www.walnuthillsrf.org) received $500 to support its Five Points Alley Biergarten project, which transformed a blighted, unused space into a hub for community events in the neighborhood.
Local architects Elizabeth Schmidt and Brad Cooper won a $1,500 grant for their Place from Space design competition (http://placefromspace.wordpress.com), which generated over 30 proposals for innovative development of vacant spaces in five neighborhoods in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.
Krista Beyrer (http://www.cahs.uc.edu/faculty/facultyprofile.aspx?epersonID=beyrerka) at University of Cincinnati received $2,000 for an initiative to use iPads to help people with language impairments caused by strokes or brain injuries communicate with others.
And Fuel awarded a $975 matching grant to Keep Cincinnati Beautiful’s Future Blooms Program (http://keepcincinnatibeautiful.org/programs/future-blooms) to fund the boarding and historically accurate painting of the iconic Paramount Building at Peebles Corner in Walnut Hills.
With Give Back Cincinnati’s (http://www.givebackcincinnati.org) former Vice President of Programs, Javi Cuadrado, taking over as Chair in 2014, Fuel Cincinnati has big plans for next year, too. Among other things, Fuel plans to create more opportunities for Give Back Cincinnati’s young professional members to connect with community projects and organizations looking for volunteers and pro bono professional services providers.
A Reminder To Pursue Your Passions
