1999 Honorees

Jack Hartman of the Chicago Transit Authority hatched the idea of CTA workers helping the communities on their routes. Mayor Richard Daley declared it Make A Difference Day, and 1,200 volunteers turned out.

In public areas of the housing projects, volunteers removed a staggering 67,000 pounds of debris. In one spot, it took six pieces of heavy machinery, two dump trucks and four garbage trucks to clear an "urban forest" of junk only to discover a tennis court underneath.

Indoors, volunteers cleaned and painted 70 apartments to put needy families and seniors into tidy new homes. At day's end, officials handed an apartment key to a woman who otherwise would have had been homeless. She was overcome with simple gratitude: "I didn't know how I could do this. I'm very happy."

$10,000 award from Paul Newman goes to Kaleidoscope child welfare agency.

A trail of compassion for a paralyzed teen - Flagstaff, Ariz.

Nick Blankenburg, 17, was paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident last August; his family has no health insurance. So on Make A Difference Day, Oct. 24, Nick's loyal friends combined heart with smarts: They launched the kind of outdoorsy projects they know mean the most to him and raised $17,000 to help pay his medical bills.

Volunteers spruced up three different locations of the Flagstaff Urban Trail System Nick often hiked. They planted flower gardens at Head Start schools. They assembled bleachers and policed the grounds at City Parks Department projects. At each project site, volunteers could give to the community, and also to a fund for Nick.

Brownie Scouts collected food for animal shelters (and stitched Nick a personalized quilt). A food drive collected staples for area shelters. Collection cans at cash registers all over town filled up with cash.

Elementary schools donated money raised from their "Nickels for Nick" campaign.

Speaking from Shriner's Hospital for Children in Sacramento, Calif., where he got state-of-the-art treatment for spinal-cord injuries, Nick marvels at what Flagstaff residents did for him, and their community, in just one day. "You never really see the true spirit of the town, then something like this comes along. All these people you don't know before that day rally behind you. It's a tremendous feeling."

$10,000 award from Paul Newman benefits the Youth Rehabilitation Fund.

"Anything you can do, I can do better," college brothers say - Ohio and Virginia

Here's how to tell the Griffiths twins apart: Jeffrey's the one who organized a "free store" where the needy could shop, a 200-strong city clean-up crew, and enough volunteers to make 1,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a homeless shelter.

Frank's the one who masterminded a book drive, elderly visitation, a carnival for needy children and an orchard-gleaning project that salvaged 17,000 pounds of apples for a local food bank.

Their dueling Make A Difference Day extravaganzas at campuses 600 miles apart Frank is at the University of Virginia, Jeffrey is at Miami University of Ohio are typical of the way the 21-year-old twins "feed off of each other," says their mother, Sharon Griffiths.

The brothers graduate next year, but at each school, student organizations have adopted Make A Difference Day as a long-term cause.

So, who won the sibling rivalry? Jeffrey rallied a total of 1,500 volunteers; Frank, 1,000. But now the colleges' presidents are talking about adopting the two-campus rivalry. The competition continues!

$10,000 award from Paul Newman benefits the University of Virginia Fund and the Miami University Make A Difference Day Organizational Fund.

The wonderful part? Pride - Racine, Wis.

A skateboard park is a pretty good thing to build on Make A Difference Day: Now kids can pop an ollie without playing in traffic.

And rusty junk doesn't belong in any waterway, so it's good that volunteer divers pulled old car bumpers from the river.

And it's great to collect books, food and clothing for those in need. And to wire a grade school for the Internet.

And it's good news that young people raised $7,000 for a future teen center.

But none of that is the very best part of Make A Difference Day in his town, says Racine Mayor Jim Smith. The best part is how attitudes change when people 7,000 total, blacks and whites, city residents and suburbanites, old and young pull together on things that matter to them.

"That's the wonderful part," Smith says, looking back at four years of Make A Difference Day projects. "It's the pride our community has in helping one another."

$10,000 award from Paul Newman goes to Youth Action Sports to create activites for at-risk youth.

Military volunteers flex muscles to help youth and the disabled - Colorado Springs

Building fences. That's how Carey Hadley spent Make A Difference Day. He and other military volunteers used their strong muscles to fence in the Pike's Peak Therapeutic Riding Center, where people with disabilities learn muscle control and balance through riding horses. Recently, Hadley met Rebeka Lucero, a bubbly 3-year-old overcoming injuries from a car crash through riding therapy. It was then he realized the true impact of the day's work. Now, he and other volunteers hope to do more for the Lucero family.

"It's infectious," Hadley says. "Once you get started volunteering, you want to keep going."

On Make A Difference Day, Hadley and other volunteers from Peterson Air Force Base joined hundreds from the Air Force Academy, Hewlett-Packard, the Army's Fort Carson and the city of Colorado Springs to give an estimated $250,000 worth of free labor in one day. A major project: the Youth Outreach Center a former K mart, now a gathering place for kids. They painted, picked up trash, pulled weeds and stripped the floor of a 16,000-square-foot music room.

Having so many enthusiastic volunteers creates a good problem how to keep them busy so the town has a new database to funnel volunteers to community needs. Many of the Make A Difference Day volunteers at the youth center already have found their niche: 80% continue to volunteer with the kids there.

$10,000 award from Paul Newman benefits Monroe Elementary School, Pike's Peak Therapeutic Riding Center, Youth Outreach Center.

Welfare-to-work moms start to change lives - Wichita, Kan.

They had heard people write off their destitute neighborhood. They had heard the slurs about lazy "welfare queens." But on Make A Difference Day, it was 14 welfare-to-work mothers who marshalled 100 volunteers to clear trash, paint a playground, promote literacy and plant hope.

"This is such an impoverished area," says single mother Loquater Atkins. Some families live behind boarded-up windows. Drugs and crime fester. But for Atkins, 30, the last straw was the paint chipping off a merry-go-round in a rundown park.

Atkins already had begun to change her life: She's enrolled in an AmeriCorps program that helps welfare mothers acquire job skills. Soon, she and others in that program began organizing to change the neighborhood.

Here's what happened: 2,500 books were given away; information on health, housing and jobs was handed out; vacant lots were cleared of trash;and Atkins personally made sure that merry-go-round got new paint. "When our work was done," she says, "we saw we really made a difference."

$10,000 award from Paul Newman benefits Colvin Elementary School.

Hungry to help, teens cook up a soup kitchen - Vernon, N.J.

Vernon Township High School students read about Make A Difference Day in their local newspaper and decided to volunteer at their local soup kitchen.

But there wasn't one.

So they created a temporary facility and then went on to trigger events in the adult world that may bring hungry residents permanent help.

It began when teenagers discovered that the nearest soup kitchen was a long bus ride away. Not fair, they reasoned: If the needy could afford to take the bus, they wouldn't need free food. So Oct. 24, they opened a one-day soup kitchen in the high school cafeteria.

On the menu: soup for 60, plus leftovers to take home. And needy families could pack up all the food they wanted from half a ton of food - bagels, vegetables - collected by the school's community service club.

But the students were still hungry for a permanent solution. They studied hunger in their community and on May 1 are to lay the facts before government and business officials. At last the teens may have a satisfied feeling: They hope their area's first permanent soup kitchen will open on the next Make A Difference Day.

$10,000 award from Paul Newman will help start Harvest House soup kitchen.

Retired telephone workers connect with poor students - Sheridan, Colo.

When retiree Don Kastle visited Fort Logan Elementary, a poor school outside Denver, he was shocked. "I'd never seen such kids in my life dressed this way," he recalls of the students who didn't even own shirts or shoes to wear. He saw a sagging building the town had no cash to restore. But he also met committed teachers who had given up raises so the school could afford to keep small classes.

Fort Logan needed a patron. So Kastle summoned fellow members of Telephone Pioneers of America, a group for phone-company retirees.

The local Pioneers planned a sweeping renovation of the school. They posted their plans on USA WEEKEND's Web site, and offers of help rolled in. US West, the Englewood, Colo.-based communications company, collected 3,000 clothing and toiletry items for the students. A law firm gave $60,000 in used office supplies, ranging from staplers to computers. And 60 volunteers transformed the school's playground into a brighter, happier place. Principal Judy Kary has proof the playground made a difference: Since Make A Difference Day, not a single child has been sent to her during recess for discipline!

But more important, the school has community connections it never had before, Kary says, as volunteers who first helped on Make A Difference Day come back again and again to help.

$10,000 award from Paul Newman benefits Fort Logan Elementary School.

12,000 college students learn good business includes helping others - National

At a time when the news from campus too often concerns binge drinking at parties, nearly 12,000 students in a business club -- Students in Free Enterprise -- spent one Saturday lending a hand to the less fortunate.

In Colorado, students not only gave poor families groceries, but also took them shopping and coached them on stretching food dollars.

In Georgia, students helped bankrupt people plan financial comebacks.

In Michigan, they tutored Native American teens on the fine points of getting a job.

In California, Kentucky and Ohio, they held career workshops.

In Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee, they built Habitat for Humanity houses. In Arizona and 10 other states, they ran food and clothing drives. From California to Maine, they taught computer and money-management workshops.

All these projects were sponsored by Students in Free Enterprise, active on 600 campuses.

$10,000 award from Paul Newman will help SIFE expand volunteer projects on Make A Difference Day 1999.