a community honors its philanthropic leaders
Jack Campbell is a man on a deadline. As chairman of the Campaign for Dignity and Independence for the Alphapointe Association for the Blind, he has taken on the responsibility of raising $4 million for the organization’s new Life Skills Campus under construction at 75th and Prospect Avenue. He’s doing pretty well so far with a little over $3.5 million raised. Part of that, however, is a $450,000 challenge grant from the J.E. and L.E. Mabee Foundation. If Alphapointe raises a matching $450,000, it meets the $4 million goal. If not, it loses the Mabee funding. The deadline is January 2002.
Campbell joined the board of directors of Alphapointe in 1974 and stayed on until 1994. It was about a year and a half ago that the organization persuaded him to return to head the funding campaign. Until that time, the self-sustaining association was not well known in the charitable community, according to Campbell. He and others have raised Alphapointe’s profile by arranging for the charitable foundations of Kansas City to tour the organization’s facilities. Most have made donations, he says.
The attorney has had the same kind of longevity in his career as a labor and employment lawyer with Shughart, Thomson & Kilroy. He started with the firm in 1972. Along the way he had a brush with politics, spending a couple of years in the Missouri legislature before entering the highly contested 1982 race for Richard Bolling’s seat in the U.S. Congress. Alan Wheat won the contest and the seat.
Recently, Campbell has served as a trustee of the MU Law School Foundation and as a board member of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. As someone who has lived with juvenile-onset diabetes since the age of 11, Campbell has a heightened awareness of the higher risk of blindness that diabetics face, and that awareness led him to Alphapointe. “Now,” he says of the organization with which he’s had a 27-year relationship, “my role is strictly to raise some money.”