Category Archives: non-profits

College Kids Growing Up Catholic

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Imagine this! Your college-age child or grandchild home for Thanksgiving break wants to talk about his faith – he speaks about the joy of worship, reading the Bible, and meeting regularly with friends for prayer and sharing. Sounds unbelievable? It’s not.

This student is involved in St. Paul’s Outreach (SPO), active on several college campuses throughout the country. Recently, the Columbus chapter serving the Ohio State and Ohio Dominican Universities celebrated its 10th anniversary. At the annual banquet attended by over 700 supporters and alumni, my nephew Andrew Kebe, SPO’s Ohio Senior Mission Director, recounted his past ten years of service to this organization that has empowered and inspired so many young people and made such a lasting impact on college campuses.

The Stewardship Foundation is honored to partner with this inspiring organization. As a leadership mentor, I’ve been personally blessed with my involvement and proud to be a father and uncle to several students impacted by SPO.

Watch the video God Has Given The Growth – Ohio 10 Year Anniversary from Saint Paul’s Outreach:

If you are moved by what you see, please consider supporting SPO with a tax-deductible donation to the Stewardship Foundation’s Donor Advised Fund where 100% of investment returns benefit the Columbus SPO Chapter.

In the donation form, Under Optional Information, enter “SPO” in the Comment box. If you’d like to learn more about this particular DAF, please call me directly at 614-800-7985.

If you have a child or grandchild who has strayed from the faith, you can make your donation to the Donor Advised Fund in their name and we will pray for them – because it’s never too late for the Holy Spirit to enflame a heart.

If you have a college-age child or grandchild who could benefit from this ministry, contact Andrew Kebe.

From the Ohio Mission Center

God has given the growth! As we look back at the 2013-2014 school year, we can truly see the effectiveness of God’s grace upon our work. Here is a glimpse of the impact from last year:

  • More than 225 students were involved in small groups on the Ohio State, Ohio Dominican, and West Virginia campuses.
  • 4 SPO Ohio alumni entered formation for priestly or religious life and 11 more agreed to serve as full-time missionaries with a Catholic ministry. In 10 years, 72 SPO Ohio alumni have served at least one year of full-time missionary work, 21 are currently in religious or priestly formation, and 73 are now married and starting families.
  • SPO Ohio continued to collaborate in close partnership with the St. Thomas More Newman Center at OSU, particularly on building a stronger Catholic Bible Study program and kicking off the school year with Catholic Rush Week.
  • We completed the renovations on our new home on 13th Avenue, bringing our evangelization efforts to a new frontier in the heart of OSU’s off-campus housing and Greek houses.

Read more on our website.

10 Days in Israel – Despite Hamas Bombs

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Despite the whine of bomb sirens and feelings of uneasiness huddling in bomb shelters, the young people signed up for Birthright Israel are still flooding into the country. For most of us Americans, it might seem that plunging into a study of Israel during such a time of conflict would be insane, but the young people, and their consenting parents, consider it a learning experience about daily life in Israel.

Birthright Israel groupTaglit-Birthright Israel, known here as simply Birthright Israel, is the brainchild of Charles R. Bronfman, a Canadian / American businessman and philanthropist who inherited Seagram spirits empire (sold to Vivendi for $34 billion) and today is the father of a family of charitable foundations including Taglit-Birthright Israel that sends Jewish youth from all over the world on free educational tours of Israel.

Philanthropy is part of the Bronfman DNA. As children, Charles and his siblings knitted squares for blankets to be sent to the troops overseas during WWII. At 17, he began to solicit money for the United Jewish Appeal. From a poor Jewish neighborhood in Montreal, he collected 50 cents from 20 friends, even though he could have donated the $10 himself and simply written their names on the donation. He did it because he wanted the donors to experience how good it feels to participate in helping others.

The Bronfman DNA is evident in Birthright Israel today, even with Hamas rockets raining down on Israel. In late July, the website reports that “fewer than 10 of the 6,000+ participants that came to Israel in the past 15 days have left trips earlier than planned.”

Birthright Israel is the first Jewish educational program with a waiting list bigger than the number of applicants who actually are able to participate in the 10-day, all expense paid live and learn experience. Over 400,000 young adults from around the world, ages 18 – 26, have taken this journey.

The Bronfman family wants young Jewish people to come to Israel to see it, experience it, talk about it, and think about what Israel means for them and the Jewish people. The New York Times published an article August 1 that recounts the personal experiences of participants who have just recently returned from their trip to the Middle East with the Taglit-Birthright Israel organization.

We live in a passionate world and our hearts go out to all those who are suffering on both sides of this conflict. We pray for quick and permanent solution and ask you to join us in this petition for peace and religious freedom.

The Great Gatsby

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green lightRecently I saw the new release of the movie The Great Gatsby, which is based on the novel written by my favorite literary author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many literary critics believe that Fitzgerald best captured the spirit of the roaring twenties and defining the hopes associated with the American Dream.

In the last line of the book, narrator Nick says: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter— tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… and one fine morning… so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Did you notice how Fitzgerald leaves Nick’s thoughts unfinished? Perhaps because his narrator knew that Gatsby would have remained ceaselessly engaged in being carried back to the past – so what was the use of looking forward and planning for the future?

The non-profits and charities that we support can’t survive in a world of Gatsbys – they need supporters who believe wholeheartedly in their cause to “run faster” and “stretch their arms farther” with volunteerism and charitable donations. These supporters live the true American Dream, they make America a better place. Knowing that it’s not beyond their reach to make a difference, they give of themselves and their money and are happy to do it.

Gatsby had a romantic idea of happiness that ceaselessly brought him back to the past. Research in psychology has examined how giving affects people’s emotional well-being and determined that helping others leads to positive emotions such as warmth and happiness. If only Gatsby had known that the elusive Daisy (represented by the green light) would never have brought him the happiness that helping others could have. If only Gatsby had spent less time with a room full of interesting people, and more time with the Stewardship Foundation.

Admittedly, we too at the Stewardship Foundation have romantic ideas. We want to help make the world a better place by supporting transformational giving based on a set of moral values set out in the Manhattan Declaration. But unlike Gatsby, we stretch out our arms everyday and run harder to help our clients discover true happiness that comes from helping causes that are aligned with a moral compass.

If you have non-cash assets like property or valuables and would like to learn how you can use those assets to do good in your lifetime, please contact us. No beating against the current here – just moving forward to what defines us as Americans. Call us at (614) 800-7985.