This is for you who privately despair or publicly wail that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Call it an antidote. Or rather, antidotes:
Theron Guerra. Brandon Zinn. Sierra Morales. Gamachu Said. Sarah Kafader. Matthew Daisley. Peter Stahl.
They’re high school students competing for the Daniels Fund scholarship. To that list, I could add another 572 semifinalists. But these are seven I met last week. They came in one after another and proceeded to leave Realtor John Todd, catering manager Greg Hencmann and me marveling and, dare I say it, hopeful.
An overused word, “hope.” So let me set the record straight. I don’t mean cotton-candy hope, all fluffy sweetness dissolving into nothingness. I don’t mean hope wreathed in a fuzzy, golden glow. I definitely don’t mean hope as an expression of ideals never put into practice.
I mean the optimism that provokes adults to stand around in a lobby after a long day of interviews, invigorated and grateful and, in some cases, searching for the parents of these young people just so we can say thank you.
That kind of hope.
Last year was the first time I helped with the Daniels Fund semifinalist interviews. Bill Daniels, cable magnate and philanthropist, wanted people from the community to be involved in the selection, and there were 267 of us. Nothing I write now, by the way, will affect the outcome.
He was a clever man, Bill Daniels. He had to know this arrangement would benefit the interviewers as much as the interviewees, that the eyes of adults are prone to scales, which fall away only in the presence of a young person triumphing over adversity.
This year, as last, I was uncertain whether to write about the interviews. I decided there was no way you could not know of the curious, keen mind of Brandon Zinn, basketball player/DJ/philosophy-club founder. Or the generosity of Sarah Kafader, who has spent 48 Sundays a year, every year of her life, helping with a church service at a nursing home. Or of Matt Daisley, a top North High student who possesses a fearlessness that is neither reckless nor arrogant, but confident. Or of Theron Guerra and Gamachu Said, children of immigrants who say they owe everything to their parents. Or of Sierra Morales.
As with so many of these young people, she comes from difficult family circumstances, but she asked us not to dwell upon that. “The past is the past. You cannot change it. The future is what I look to.”
Then there is Peter Stahl, who says: “What’s kept me going is that no one expected me to succeed.”
Daniels called them diamonds in the rough. This year, community organizations and schools nominated 2,000 students in Colorado, New Mexico and parts of Wyoming and Utah. Two hundred fifty will receive the scholarship, which is intended to cover what other scholarships and grants do not.
Every year, the community interviewers watch a video of past recipients talking about what the scholarship meant to them. The same part always gets me. Theresa Gatewood, 2000 inaugural scholar, saying that winning the scholarship told her that someone thought she had value.
I asked her about that Monday. “It came from a reality that the odds were already against me,” she said. “Being a double-token (black and female), coming from poverty, from a family engaged in gang activity, the head of household an alcoholic, parents who had not graduated from high school, and then knowing, knowing that if you had an education, your life could be different.”
Her grandparents had sixth-grade educations, and they told her they could give her food and clothing and shelter, “but you will have to make your own future.”
And how do you do that? “Fortitude and resiliency. . . . I decided I was going to be part of a different creed, that I would not accept what was given to me but what I deserved and demanded. . . . We do not have to be the products of our environments. We can be whomever we choose to be.”
Theresa and I talk for nearly an hour. I cannot do her justice here. She is flat-out incredible. With the help of programs like Colorado Uplift, College Summit and the Daniels Fund, she graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a major in communication and minors in sociology and psychology. She is now nearly finished with her master’s degree from Colorado State University in organizational leadership and performance.
She is also a school partnership manager for College Summit Colorado. She is helping schools help more students go on to college.
In other words, she is doing exactly what Bill Daniels envisioned: Giving back. Paying it forward.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
