When Colorado businessman Thomas Gamel gave money to a cause, those who knew him say it was because he cared about an outcome whether it was helping students go to college, or unemployed people find and keep a job.
He once drove to a woman’s trailer home in southwest Denver to see for himself how she was living, and find out how to help her.
Despite how sick he was in the last months of his life, he still attended meetings of Upstream Impact, a nonprofit group he founded, to meet with the northeast Denver families he was trying to help out of poverty.
“He was not one to just write a check and walk away,” said Jason Janz, executive director of Upstream Impact. “He wanted to bypass bureaucracy and give directly to people.”
Gamel passed away last week. He was 75.
Gamel, investor and owner of Timpte Inc., donated money to several causes. school in Denver, he saw academic improvements.
After two years, the improvements the school seemed to be making stopped.
But Gamel still cared about the community where his grandmother had lived, and about education.
“He had this deep, deep conviction that all kids regardless of background or socio-economic status should be able to get a good education, and that an education was a gateway out of poverty,” said Zachary Rahn, a former teacher and assistant principal of Cole, and now principal of Ashley Elementary, another Denver school. “He experienced that himself.”
So Gamel founded , where he selected families from the neighborhood to pair them with a mentor, they called an “ally” who would help connect them to resources with anything from finding a job, choosing a school for their kids, or finding transportation.
The goal was to help pull 1,000 families out of poverty in the next four years.
Of the first 19 people they initially worked with, 16 were able to get a job and keep it for more than six months.
Recently, Gamel also had started providing scholarships to Emily Griffith Technical College, but asked that recipients work through his organization to receive other supports including the partnership with an ally.
“There’s no significant change without a significant relationship,” Janz said Gamel and the group had realized.
The amount of funding that will continue the work has not been released, but Janz said Gamel told him the work would be able to continue for a long time.
“He will be greatly missed in the Denver community,” Rahn said. “What he did for individual schools and families, it was not a political thing. It was so personal to him.”
Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372, yrobles@denverpost.com or @yeseniarobles
Memorial
A tribute will be held on Tuesday evening in Thomas Gamel’s honor by those who were affected by his philanthropy. Those who were, are asked to contact Alysa at amcmanus@upstreamim pact.org for more details.
