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Sometimes the problems of the world seem overwhelming. You watch the news, you read the stories and you think, ‘Wow, I wish someone would do something about all this misery and suffering.’ But – and this is always the case – that someone is you.
Examples are legion. Peter Benenson was so appalled by the imprisonment of a couple of Portuguese students for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom that he wrote an op-ed in a British paper that encouraged ordinary citizens to write letters on the kids’ behalf. That letter-writing campaign became Amnesty International.
When former NBC executive Bob Wright and his wife, Suzanne, found out their grandson had autism, they looked for help in figuring out what to do. The Wrights were dumbfounded by the lack of organized support for parents and grandparents of children with autism. So they created a community themselves. It is now Autism Speaks.
LPGA major champion and CBS on-course commentator Dottie Pepper has no grand plans to change the world. But neither did Benenson nor the Wrights nor William Booth, a poor Methodist minister whose opening line of a letter to his congregants read, “The Christian mission is a salvation army,” thus launching one of the oldest and most successful charitable organizations in the world. Pepper’s epiphany came one morning in early December when she checked her e-mail.
“I get the daily CBS Sports Report,” said Pepper, whom the network recently promoted to be its lead on-course analyst. “The beginning of last month, I saw that (San Francisco 49ers cornerback) Richard Sherman had paid off (the lunch and breakfast debts of schoolchildren) in the Bay Area with a middle school. After doing a little more research on it, I found out that he’d actually done it in Tacoma (Wash.) as well. So (Sherman) had taken care of a lot of kids right before Thanksgiving.”
Curious, Pepper did more research and learned that 20 percent of the kids who attended the Dorothy Nolan Elementary School near her home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. – the very school Pepper and her sister, Jackie Diehl, attended when they were children, and a school that her grandfathers helped form when they sat on the Saratoga Springs School Board – were eligible for either reduced-price or free lunches.
“A lot of people don’t know this problem even exists,” Pepper said. “It’s been a really good year for my husband and me and if we can make things a little easier for families that didn’t have much on the holidays, it was just a good thing to do.”
So, Pepper called the principal at Dorothy Nolan Elementary. And then she waited.
“It was really kind of funny, I picked up the phone, called my elementary school, got through to the principal and she lost my number,” Pepper said. “A couple of weeks later, she called and said, ‘I’m really sorry, I found this slip of paper that fell through the cracks. What do you want?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m trying to help you out.’ ”
Pepper then paid off the student lunch debt for about 50 elementary-school kids at Dorothy Nolan.
“If you act locally, you can really change things.”
Dottie Pepper
According to census data, close to 15,000 people in Saratoga County live below the poverty line. The majority of those are women. And a majority of that majority are single mothers.
“I did not grow up in a wealthy family by any means,” Pepper said. “And that school, the school that I went to, has 20 percent of the kids in aided lunch or free lunch. If we can make that debt go away and get a few more people thinking about how they can help, I think we’ve done all right.”
She didn’t want publicity. In fact, she initially shunned any attempt to report on her donation. But after a story appeared in the Albany Times Union, Pepper realized that her actions might do for others what Richard Sherman’s did for her.
“It was never about publicizing what we did,” she said. “The reason for going out with a little media on this was to try to get people to think about ways they could help. Maybe it’s one kid, one family, but if enough people take that on, we can minimize this problem and hopefully make it go away.”
Dottie Pepper is not forming Amnesty International. But, then again, neither was Peter Benenson. All he did was encourage a letter-writing campaign that grew into a movement.
“If you act locally, you can really change things,” Pepper said. “People think, ‘Oh, that’s a big problem, it’s a national problem, there’s nothing I can do.’ But you really can. You can do something, no matter how small. You can make a difference.”
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