Dec
Brian Bordainick didn’t get much response when he sent e-mail blasts last month asking people to make time to discuss an ambitious idea. He wanted to talk about building a football field and track, using mostly private donations, on the campus of a flooded New Orleans high school.
He needed to raise about $200,000 to compete for an NFL matching grant.
Some wrote him back, applauding the effort. Others called the project insanely ambitious, with some noting the ongoing recession.
But Bordainick and fellow teachers at George Washington Carver High School persevered. More than a month later, supporters of the 9th Ward Field of Dreams, as the project is called, have secured a $200,000 pledge from the Recovery School District, in-kind donations and $27,000 in cash and checks, some arriving in donations as small as $6.
“We just kept pushing and pushing and e-mailing to do everything in our power to get this done,” said Bordainick, 23, Carver’s athletic director and a product of Teach For America, a nonprofit that taps college graduates to teach in impoverished school districts. “It’s been amazing to watch this city come together.”
On Monday, an application seeking $200,000 to help pay for a $1.85 million synthetic turf football field with bleachers and a running track on Carver’s campus was hand-delivered in New York to an organization that manages the NFL Grassroots Program, just meeting the deadline.
But the drive is far from over.
Local project supporters must compete for the grant and appear to have a roughly 1-in-6 chance, based on previous awards.
Each year, about 100 applications for the NFL grants are submitted from groups nationwide, with only 15 to 20 grants usually being awarded, said Beverly Smith, senior program director for youth development with Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which manages the 10-year-old program.
Smith said the NFL, which awarded 36 such grants in 2007, could dole out roughly $2.5 million to about 17 projects nationwide by early next year.
Bordainick said about $500,000 in in-kind donations are pledged toward total project costs. But even with the NFL grant and in-kind donations, supporters might have to raise another $750,000….
Originally Posted on NOLA.com by Darran Simon.
