This town is a remarkably generous one. I suppose I have long known this, but every week it astounds me.
Consider last week. It was a simple story about a woman named Joyselyn Knight.
Hers was a tale of a once-homeless mother of three young girls who, practically out of work and money, decided to enroll in school, and got a degree and a good job.
She never said, and I never wrote, that she needed anything. Yet over the past week, I have received dozens of calls and e-mails from people wanting to give her everything from money and gift cards to clothing.
“I just want to make sure she and the girls have a nice Christmas,” was a common explanation.
In the hardest of times most of us have ever known, 11,500 people on Wednesday donated $8 million on Colorado Gives Day, a 24-hour online charity fundraising effort by the Community First Foundation and FirstBank. All of it poured in over the first 16 hours, swamping the system.
That generosity happens a lot, and not just at the holidays.
Within a week of my writing last spring about a disabled Colorado State Patrol trooper’s need for an electric wheelchair, 11 were made available to her.
Then there is Jenn Brown, whom I caught up with on her lunch break at the Glendale doggy day care where she works two days a week.
You may remember her. I wrote about her in August, how she needed about $1,000 to save her dog, Frank, a 4-year-old white boxer that had developed a series of cancerous tumors.
Her life was a mess. Falling in love with and adopting Frank changed all that. Her friends planned a fundraiser for her and Frank in Cheesman Park.
“He is doing really well now,” Brown, 26, said as we sat down. Frank did lose one ear to the cancer, she said.
More than 100 people turned out at the park fundraiser, people she had never met before, but all of whom she greeted personally.
She cannot even estimate how many others donated money to help Frank.
“Having it be so unexpected makes you feel like, wow, people will reach out and care for you even if they don’t know you,” she said.
“It left me with a faith in humanity I don’t think was there before. Everything is always bad news and people being mean. You lose faith, you know? What this taught me is that for every negative person out there, there is another good person.”
She won’t say how much money was raised, just that it was a lot. It all went to Frank and can be accessed only through Funds for Frank, the account set up to pay for her dog’s medical care.
There was a downside.
People began coming to her, asking for money, Brown said. It is not her money, she would tell them. It is for Frank.
“I did kind of go into hiding for about two weeks,” she said. “Nothing comes without a price. I learned that one.”
She is taking Frank in next week to have his veterinarian check a pencil-eraser-size lump she found on his right shoulder. Doctors told her last summer the cancer could return.
“If the news is not good, they say I will have a decision to make,” Brown said. “Do I put him through all of that again? I just want Frank to be happy and in a good place.”
Through the kindness of complete strangers, she is now able to provide Frank exactly that.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
