Getting your player ready...
The bar at McCormick & Schmick’s in the DTC is exactly the place where you expect to find people who have done well for themselves – ones with the most to lose in the debate over how much more we tax, to finance how much more we’re spending. I’d been rushing to wrap up real estate stories before hopping a flight to spend holidays with our family; but I walked over to join a couple of guys for a quick drink.
Fueled by a couple of Manhattans and a high-octane concoction called a Dorothy Parker, the chatter floated over various tropical havens – the beaches at Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Playa del Carmen – then veered to the drug war in Mexico; and from there into an unexpected cul-de-sac: what these people were doing now, without any coercion, to help others in need. Jack O’Connor, broker/owner of The Denver 100, a boutique real estate company who also markets a Mexican resort project, recalled a horrifying experience two years ago. He’d been headed across the border with a volunteer group to build houses for people living in Colonias – homeless settlements near Juarez – a trip he’d made numbers of times before. This time he’d brought his young son along to share the experience. Someplace beyond the border crossing the bus was pulled over by armed men – Federales or banditos, O’Connor had no idea. “All I know is, they had assault rifles,” he recalled to the group around the table, which had now grown to six. As he and his son sat in the bus, the men boarded with a dog trained to sniff out munitions, and quickly found nailing guns that volunteers had packed in their gear, the kind that make the pop-pop sound at construction sites, to be used to drive wall plates into concrete foundations for the small homes. The men seized the nail guns and left. That got Dan Rudden going. He’s an investment guy with a DTC company called Financial Visions, who’d been talking about a railroad project, before the conversation took its very personal drift. Rudden, it turned out, had lost a granddaughter to a brain tumor a few years ago. That had prompted his daughter Tammy to launch a foundation in her daughter’s memory – the Gabby Krause Foundation. Each year it works with Children’s Hospital to identify kids fighting cancer, and provide them with a $350 bag of very personalized gifts that a kid can use to while away the hours during chemotherapy and other ordeals. Tammy Rudden Krause, who knows lots about fundraising from her 9-to-5 with Starlight Children’s Foundation, said that GKF was now doing that for 300 kids a year – and has expanded into Kansas City and Indianapolis. Giving, meanwhile, is down across the board this season, she added – as people deal with uncertainty over the ‘fiscal cliff.’ While others joined in, I thought about how many people I know in real estate that do such uncommon things with their success. Jack O’Connor, by the way, heads up Partners for Hope, gathering from agents to give to area families facing health crises. It operates with virtually no overhead costs because of agent’s volunteer work. A thousand dollars from their most recent proceeds, he told the group, would be going to Tammy Rudden’s foundation.
