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The statistic jumps off the screen with enough force to startle anyone with the capacity to care: In 2022, the nation’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—a combination of household cash and government benefits like food stamps and housing subsidies—recorded the largest year-over year jump in U.S. history. Again: In U.S. history.
It went from 7.8 percent of the population to 12.4 percent in what is generally regarded as the wealthiest country on the planet. The overall poverty rate of 11.5 percent means that 38.3 million people live below that dark threshold—household income of less than $2,100 for a married couple with just one child.
This, then, is the scope of the challenge confronting the non-profit strands of our social safety net. As executives from those charitable organizations will tell you, there’s never enough money to cover the need. They need help. And those who answer that call sometimes contribute at exceptional levels.
That’s why, each December since 2008, Ingram’s has recognized the better angels among us with its Local Heroes awards. They are a celebration of those who rolled up their sleeves, opened their hearts and their checkbooks, and rose to the challenge.
They will forever be underdogs in that fight. Yet they refuse to accept things the way they are. They mean to bring about change, one act of kindness at a time. Please join us in thanking them for their service and their contributions—and the example they set for all of us.
Dave Damico
He retired from his job with the state of Missouri back in 2002 and for several seasons, Dave Damico scratched his itch to volunteer by signing on with the Kansas City Royals. “Everyone thought I had the greatest job in the world, spending days at baseball games,” he says. But a yearning to be involved in something more meaningful and a personal passion for history coalesced with a chance encounter at the Plaza Art Fair in 2006 and a volunteer-recruiting booth for the National World War Museum and Memorial. He signed up on the spot that day, and since then he’s gone on to become the first person in the facility’s history to surpass 10,000 hours of volunteer time. In recognition of his extensive service, the museum designated Damico to be the ringer when the bell tolled to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended The Great War. This being a community much smaller than its numbers suggest, that turned out to be a particularly meaningful moment for him: Nearly a century ago, when the Liberty Memorial was dedicated in 1926, the disabled veteran chosen for that same task was one Joseph Damico—Dave’s great-uncle. “I never met my great uncle; he died when I was 4 or 5, and I’d never heard the story about him tolling the bell,” Damico marvels. From checking tickets to walking the main museum offering guidance to leading tours, he’s staged a meaningful second act with his voluntarism. The part of his duties he cherishes most comes when young school students—tens of thousands of them, over the years—learn about the extent of the war and the toll it extracted on humanity. The trick, he says, is to improve their understanding of the war’s place in history, “without dwelling too much on the death and destruction. I really enjoy that. The goal is, with every tour, get one kid interested in history. I just love being there. It’s fun talking to kids, seeing the looks on their faces and explaining to them, if they’re 13 or older, that if they were that age in 1917, they might have been just a few years away from sitting in a trench holding a rifle. That usually gets their attention and makes it personal.” The longtime children’s services worker for the state also sits on the Missouri Coalition for Quality Care, a nursing-home patients’ advocacy group, where he serves as president. Those years of service will, one day, represent a large part of his philanthropic legacy. What does he hope to have left behind in its wake? “When I hang it up at the museum,” he says, “I hope I’ll be remembered as someone who did the best I could do, who tried to help everybody who needed help.”
Bob Dunn
Before he retired earlier this year, Bob Dunn had logged more than 35 years at the family business-turned-ESOP, JE Dunn Construction. He spent several years in traditional construction-company functions like Safety, Marketing, Project Management before moving into the Community Affairs. That role, in many ways, made him the face of the company’s philanthropic efforts for three decades as head of the Dunn Family Foundation. He made it his mission to enrich lives through foundation, company, and employee engagement for the region’s largest contractor, and you could find him as a regular participant at Ingram’s Philanthropic Industry Outlook assemblies, advocating not only on behalf of JE Dunn, but for a more focused, efficient and effective regional philanthropic community. In addition to supporting multiple charities on a personal level, he served as a community’s moral compass with his consistent encouragement to other organizations and individuals, promoting donations of time, talent, and treasure. And when he preached that message, he was most definitely not preaching to the converted—few companies bring to the philanthropic mission what the employee-owners at JE Dunn do: A flat commitment of 10 percent of its pretax profit as the starting point. “Public companies, they have shareholders,” he says, and “they have to worry about increasing shareholder wealth, and when they look at how much to give, they’re generally at about 1 percent.” The leadership—Dunn’s father, Bill, brother Terry and Gordon Lansford today as CEO—have never wavered on that tithing-level pledge, out of a belief that “it’s just the right thing to do.” Beyond that, the corporation and the foundation have set standards of giving that, in some ways, become table stakes for other companies who want to establish their philanthropic credentials in this region. More than 1,000 non-profits have been on the receiving end of a foundation grant over the decades, and employees of the firm donate more than 50,000 hours of volunteer service every year. His leadership of those corporate initiatives has extended that reach from Kansas City to more than two dozen office locations around the country as the firm has grown, helping reshape corporate giving in each community with the over-arching focus on community development, education, health and well-being, and social impact. Having witnessed the good works of this region’s philanthropic donors, corporate and individual, and of the non-profit community, Dunn nonetheless says that “we need more people to come forward. If you want to complain about crime and all these other issues, if you’re not getting involved to solve the problem, then you are the problem.”
Ted Higgins
True inflection points in life are few, so it’s easy for Ted Higgins to recall two that led him to transform health-care delivery in the failed nation/state of Haiti—a violent, corrupt, and deeply impoverished Caribbean island. The first came as a fourth-year surgical resident at Yale Medical Center when he was required to spend three months at central Haiti’s Hospital Albert Schweitzer. There, he says, he was shocked by the lack of surgical access for patients. “Many of the patients I saw traveled two to three days just to get to the surgical facility,” says Higgins, now retired after a long surgical career here. “I learned first-hand that 75 percent of the world lacks adequate access to surgical care. It is quite different than surgical access in Kansas City. This observation had a profound effect on me.” After med school and training, he went into private practice here, making annual church-mission trips to the Dominican Republic for 20 years. Then came the Haitian earthquake of 2010 and inflection point No. 2. “I knew I needed to return to Haiti,” Higgins says. “My nurse practitioner was Haitian American, so after Kim and I returned from a trip to Africa, she was able to find a delivery room in rural Haiti where we could bring a mission team and operate.” He went on to lead mission teams on trips three or four times a year and developed a training program in Port Au Prince to help train surgical residents there. “Clearly, with other surgeons and surgical residents involved, we needed more operating room space,” he says. “Initially, there were others involved in building a surgicenter, but when it was time to write the check, I was the only one at the table.” Higgins is a fourth-generation surgeon, raised in upstate New York, who sees his charitable efforts as a continuation of the work his father and uncle did, taking care of patients regardless of payment ability. “They passed down the concept to me that medicine was a right, not a privilege, and all people deserved care,” Higgins says. His other engagements included the KC Care Clinic, where surgical patients paid just $50, he says, “so patients understood there was value to the work. This was Dr. Schweitzer’s philosophy that all work has value.” Higgins also organized the first Research Rough Rider Bicycle Team to raise funds for the annual MS Bike Ride, part of an effort that raised nearly a million dollars for MS research over the years. As his enterprise in Haiti grew, it became successful enough to attract two talented young Haitian surgeons—most finished school and emigrated—and hire colleagues in other fields to set up a surgical practice with 24/7 trauma and emergency capabilities. An expansion in 2020 has extended the clinic’s reach to 14,000 patients a year, providing care in basic medicine, pediatrics, maternity, HIV cases, and community outreach. It’s an impressive legacy of caring and compassion, but Higgins isn’t about legacies. “Really, all I want,” he says, “is for others to realize what a difference they can make in the lives of under-served people in the world.”
Cheri Rhodes
Faith and family were foundational pillars of Cheri Rhodes’ personal philanthropy growing up, and they still stand tall to this day. But she might not be as engaged as she’s been with ScrapsKC for the past seven years if it weren’t for another irresistible force: banana muffins. Seven years ago, she and her two daughters began brining homemade muffins from the frozen bananas in her freezer to feed the homeless outside the Downtown library. It wasn’t long before they developed a reputation as “The Muffin Girls,” and from that point, for their involvement with a non-profit that serves the needs of the homeless. “Obsession” is too strong a word, but Cheri is fixated on doing all the little things that can make a difference for the homeless community seeking services from ScrapsKC. Buying gloves, stocking caps and blankets when she finds a tranche on sale, for example, or when she hits the mother lode at a garage sale. Her work also caught the attention of the Lathrop GPM Foundation—she’s a Director of Practice Management for the law firm—which stepped up with a $7,000 grant to ScrapsKC after she was nominated by a partner in the firm for the grant. Giving has always come naturally, Rhodes says, going back 25 years now in partnering with her siblings for holiday season adopt-a-family efforts. “That was something my mom wanted us to do,” says Rhodes, who hails from a large Catholic family in Leawood. As a mother herself, she’s found reward in passing a similar commitment on to her daughters. “It’s not that cumbersome and you don’t have to spend a lot of money; just be there and listen to these folks,” she says. “I think it’s been really good for my daughters, and they’ve learned a lot and gained an understanding of the many challenges the homeless face. We’ve had lots of conversations about the circumstances that bring people to that place, and because of that, they are more grateful for what they have. Occasionally, they have brought friends with them, and it’s been good for those friends who don’t often see that side of life.” Touching the lives of the less fortunate, Rhodes says, can be impactful, even if you don’t see immediate results. “If anything, that’s probably what I’m most proud of—that feeling that not only am I raising good humans, but that they’re going to be a bit kinder and lend a smile or ear to somebody that they otherwise might not, just because they have been around folks and heard their stories.”
Katherine Schorgl
With nearly 35 years of active volunteering on her resume, Katherine Schorgl points to a quote—author unknown—that she says resonates deeply with her and fuels that passion to serve: “Volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. You vote in elections once a year, but when you volunteer, you vote every day about the world you want to live in.” Schorgl has built a solid resume of board service with various non-profits in the Kansas City region, but her longest-running act has been on behalf of the Junior League, for which she has volunteered going on 35 years since she earned her degree from Texas Christian University. “It wasn’t really until I graduated, moved with my husband to his hometown of KC and joined the Junior League that I became dedicated to philanthropy, or as my kids would say, it was when my “volaholism” (addiction to volunteering) began,” she says. The breadth of that “addiction” includes stints as president and director of sustainers at the Junior League. She cays it’s “an organization I will be involved with forever, because it prepared me to lead various non-profit organizations and chair fundraisers in Kansas City.” She’s also on the Symphony League, as immediate past president and is on the capital-campaign committee for Life Unlimited. Previously, she served with the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance, the Kansas City Ballet Guild, the Cambridge North Tower Campaign committee for the University of Kansas Hospital, the Children’s TLC board (now Ability KC) and her neighborhood’s Armour Fields Homes Association board. That extensive service has given her a unique perspective on the current non-profit world of volunteers, which she views with some concern: “In my 34 years working as a volunteer, I have watched philanthropy become more and more staff driven—which is expensive for the philanthropy—as the day-availability of volunteers has decreased,” she says. “I think this correlates with more women being more prevalently full-time in the work force and a greater value placed on work-life balance—and volunteering is more work.” In that situation, today’s potential volunteers confront the same challenges Schorgl has had to master. “First, I determine how much time I have, ensuring my family comes first. Then I participate with organizations that have causes that I embrace and that I feel I have something positive to bring to the table.” While many companies do offer a small amount of time away from the office to volunteer, she says, it hasn’t kept pace with the loss of volunteers with day availability, and she believes that more corporate-side incentives would help refill the volunteer pipeline.
Dan Stalp
Dan Stalp’s service resume is bristled with support for the likes of United Way, Solace House, Catholic Foundation of Northeast Kansas, Gift of Life, Kids TLC Annual Fund, and Church of the Ascension. “The common denominator among the boards I have served are children and/or had a faith component,” he says, and in most cases, that work benefits “agencies and people who needed a ‘hand out’ and a ‘hand up.’ ” There’s another volunteer contribution he’s made that is particularly meaningful if you believe that business success today drives charitable giving tomorrow. For 11 years, he has offered career and organizational guidance through the Helzberg Executive Mentoring Program. “Of all the non-profits I have served, HEMP has been the most effortless for me,” says Stalp, president of Sandler Training in Overland Park. “God has gifted me with the ability to inspire improved performance for sales and sales leaders. The mentees and their respective companies are ripe for this type of work.” Mentees benefit from lessons he learned buying and selling companies during his career, along with some powerful networking assistance. This native of northeast Nebraska had an early—and lasting—lesson in being his brother’s keeper when, in second grade, he saw his father align with other farmers to harvest the fall crop of a neighbor who had fallen ill. “That had a really big impact on me,” he says, as did the lifelong volunteer baking and sewing his mother did until the week before she passed at the age of 89. With HEMP, he meets mentees two or three times a month for three years. “I’m inspired by the impact I can have on them, their business, and ultimately their community by listening to them and offering advice when asked. The mentees become even more productive corporate citizens,” he says. “They provide stable, well-paying jobs, in a healthy working environment.” It’s an example of what he calls “digging your well before you’re thirsty”—that is, volunteering before you retire, he says. “While working, you have more resources to impact your volunteer efforts because you are entrenched in the business community and more people who will return your call,” Stalp says. Too often, he says, people who volunteer after retirement can be disappointed by the level of work they’re doing or frustrated by the lack of support from a non-profit. “They expect it to be like the business they retired from, in terms of staff and support,” Stalp says. “That is not a realistic expectation.” His service here started by volunteering with United Way after moving to Kansas City in 1993. Carrying it forward, he and Lisa raised four children and instilled similar values when they were old enough to volunteer. “Later, when our kids were putting resumes together in college for Greek life or awards, they all had a nice resume for non-profit work already,” he says. His own philanthropic legacy, he hopes, will evoke the message of Matthew 13:8: “He was fertile soil, had an impact, and brought forth 100-fold the seeds he planted.”
