Students
Anthony Munoz Foundation Is Looking For Straight ‘A’ Students
Do you know a Greater Cincinnati Straight ‘A’ high school student? I’m not talking about a student who necessarily gets 100% on every test. The ‘A’s that the Anthony Munoz Foundation are looking for include Academic excellence and Athletic Achievement, Actively serving in the community while possessing a strong Ambition, a winning Attitude and the Ability to overcome Adversity.
Nominate him or her for the Anthony Munoz Foundation Straight A Scholarship. While freshmen, sophomores, and junior are eligible for recognition from Anthony Munoz himself, Senior high school students are eligible for the monetary scholarship. The top 18 Senior finalists will be invited to a luncheon (9boys/9girls) and the two winners will be chosen (1boy/1girl) The winners receive $5,000 and the remaining finalists will recevie $2,000.
All high school students with a minimum of a 3.0 grade point average and in the Foundation’s Impact Region are eligible. All students nominated will receive a letter of recognition signed by Anthony Muñoz along with name recognition on the Straight “A” Scholarship webpage. Nominations are due by February 25th. Click here to nominate today!
Cincinnati Philanthropist Roger Grein Is An Inspiration
I’d like to tell you a little about the man with whom I have been spending a lot of time working with these past few weeks. His mother used to call him a ‘Gift from God” and I think she was pretty intuitive.
Roger Grein was recently honored nationally and locally with distinguished honors for his lifelong generosity and focus on strengthening lives and communities. He was selected from 19,000 full time volunteers as the National Father George Mader Award by the Catholic Volunteer Network. Named after the Network’s founder, the annual Award is given to an organization or individual that encourages lay men and women to serve others locally, nationally, or internationally. Grein was also named 2012 Philanthropist of the Year from the Association of Fundraising Professionals Greater Cincinnati Chapter.
The Man Behind The Awards
At 70, Roger is a simple man. He still lives in the modest house in Lockland where he spent many years of his life and comes to work every day in a nondescript building on Benson Street in Reading.
But inside those walls, inspiration comes alive. To the right of his desk are rows of softball trophies – some so tall they reach higher than my knee (And those, he says, only represent a fraction of the trophies he had. He donates them to charities.) Each trophy represents another milestone in his 36 year coaching career, a journey that led teams to world championships and travels to Hawaii, Mexico, Sweden and the former Soviet Union.
All of that is from a man who, in school never came close to earning a spot on sport teams. Roger was asked to chalk the base lines, collect towels and fetch water instead.
You see, Roger was never expected to excel – physically or mentally. He was six months old when Frank and Thelma took him home from St. Joseph Infant Home. His birth certificate read ‘disnormal baby.’ He might not walk, the doctors said. He might not talk. And he might never know them.
Thelma would have none of that. In her eyes, her son could do anything. “Heal-toe,” she used to say. She walked her son everywhere, made him study, helped him find summer jobs, taught him about giving back, and ensured he was included. She expected from her son what other mothers expect from their sons – great things.
“The only time I realized I was different was when someone asked me why I walked the way I do,” Roger told me.
By the time he was around 11, he had already started a lawn business and joined an investment club. He used to get out of class to check the stock market, he remembers.
Roger studied finance at the University of Cincinnati, earning his MBA, but even with two degrees work was hard to come by. So he got back into the lawn cutting business and started handing out business cards, asking customers if they needed tax service.
That first year, Roger did 25 returns and his mother typed them up. By the third year he was doing 345 returns and had become the tax commissioner in three municipalities. In 1970, he was doing 850 returns with a staff of eight.
Unknown, however, even to family was that in his success, Roger was secretly giving away thousands…at one point, giving over half a million each year. In 1999 he gave Northern Kentucky University $500,000 for softball player scholarships and to improve the girls’ softball field, and for students with disabilities.
It was about 12 years ago, after learning of an NKU philanthropy program for students, sponsored by the Mayerson Foundation, that he vowed to expand the idea. That promise led to his meeting with Father Michael Graham at Xavier University to start a similar program there, which led to 34 colleges and universities embracing his philanthropy education model through a program that is managed by Ohio Campus Compact. And, now to over 2000 local teens engaged in becoming young philanthropists through Magnified Giving.
The vision of Magnified Giving is for every high school student in America, beginning with Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, to someday have an opportunity to learn firsthand how to be generous and wise philanthropists through hands-on experience. Participating school groups are challenged to determine how they want to invest up to $2000 in a nonprofit.
The organization’s fourth year is seeing a record number of schools and students involved. Over 2000 students in 36
Magnified Giving programs (35 school-based and one community-based) are researching hundreds of nonprofit agencies, sending over 300 grant invitation letters, and will be awarding grants collectively totally nearly $60,000 at the 2012-2013 Award Event, scheduled for April 30 at McAuley High School.
Greater Cincinnati Students Doing Good – A+ For Kindness
It is so wonderful to see young people being encouraged to make a difference in their world. More than 1200 Greater Cincinnati high school students from over 100 schools attended last October’s Anthony Munoz Foundation’ s Youth Leadership Seminar where they were challenged to come up with a community service project to spread kindness. Their ideas made such an impact.
One Example
Students at Ursuline Academy already make sandwiches that they donate for distribution through a local shelter and they have a club that knits scarves for those who need warmth. Now, each of those recipients will be getting a ‘love note’ attached to the gift that students made as part of their Youth Leadership Seminar project. It is all about uplifting those who can benefit from nurturing encouragement. I just love it! And by the way, I am told this was totally student driven.
Anderson Township Students Shopped For Beech Acres’ Families
Pennies and quarters at a time, students from Wilson Elementary, Summit Elementary, and Nagel Middle School collected nearly $7,000 in change to purchase holiday gifts for more than 200 needy local families who participate in Beech Acres Parenting Center programs. They bought their presents at the Anderson Target store last week and I had so much fun taking their pictures. It was part of the Shop & Share Holiday Project, a Beech Acres Parenting Center tradition. Forest Hills students and Beech Acres supporters raise money and shop for families facing financial hardships.
“For every $100 that the students donate, we are able to help another family. It’s been so exciting for them each morning when we announce how many families they’ve helped that day,” said Jen Schlosser, who coordinated the school fund-raising efforts. “The kids are surprised and humbled by all the things that people are asking for.”
An estimated 205 Beech Acres families will receive gifts this year. Now that is a good thing!
Bake Me Home Girls Encourage Philanthropy
Have you heard about Bake Me Home? It’s a fabulous Cincinnati nonprofit founded by two twin sisters (Emma and Amy Bushman, now 11) and their mother (Alison Bushman). I wrote a story about them in a previous post. Please click here to read it.
Emma entered the ‘Go Orange for No Kid Hungry’ national essay contest and I was able to get a copy of it. I don’t know about you but I find it so uplifting to read about philanthropy from the minds of youth.
Bake Me Home is a charitable organization dedicated to promoting volunteerism and providing disadvantaged moms and kids with direct services that encourage shared family experiences. It was established in 2008 and is a Better Business Bureau approved charity.
It was Christmas Eve-Eve 2010 at a homeless family shelter. My mom, my sister, and I were reading to the kids there. A girl, older than I was at the time, wanted to read one of the books out loud too. She got up in front of everybody and began to read. She was so determined to read that book, even though the kids around her quickly lost interest as she struggled to pronounce the words. I love to read, and it was clear that she liked to read, but just because I had been given a better opportunity to learn, I was a better reader than she was. It occurred to me that it’s probably hard to learn when your hungry all the time and moving around a lot. I would be absolutely devastated if I couldn’t read.
I left the shelter that night thinking a lot about how my life was different from the kids who live there. I spend quite a bit of time hanging out at shelters because my mom, my sister, and I have our own charity called Bake Me Home that provides services to families from homeless and battered women’s shelters, but this night really brought the differences into perspective. Until then I thought about things like the fact that I have my own room, and get to do extra activities like tennis lessons. That night was the first time I realized what a difference there was in our education too. My mom and I both cried in the car on the way home that night. She said it made her sad to think about what a beautiful reader that determined girl could be if she had all the advantages that we did.
Well, we know that we can’t do everything to help homeless kids, but we can let them know them even strangers care about them, and we can help them buy some food. In our Bake Me Home Tote Bags, we give out a $20 grocery store gift card (among other things!). Just last year we gave out 342 $20 gift cards. That’s $6,840 worth of grocery money to hungry families. If I win this essay contest I will donate the money to my non-profit organization so that we can continue to help these kids.
I still think about that girl, and how hard it must be to learn to read when you are hungry, and this is why ending childhood hunger in America is important to me.
Bake Me Home was recently featured on The List