You Can Someday See It!

As you read the grim news of events in the world, including wars, disease, natural disasters, and people acting in ways that can only hurt other people, it comes as a bolt of lightning when something of such enormous good as what happened recently in New Orleans takes place.

For those of you who follow the DeVos Sport Business Management Program and the creation of the Hope for Stanley Foundation, you already know that we began working in New Orleans in the Lower Ninth Ward in the rebuilding process after Hurricane Katrina. In December of 2006, we began to tear out the insides of the home of Stanley Stewart. Stanley became a symbol for us as the face of the people in the Lower Ninth. On the weekend of October 13 and 14 2007, my wife Ann, daughter Emily, ten students from the current DeVos program, a member of the Inaugural Class and her Mom and I converged at Stanley’s house to paint the walls of his recreated home.

We followed by a week the extraordinary efforts of Smitty Pignatelli, who was a member of the first trip in December. Smitty came earlier in the spring with a crew from Massachusetts to put a roof on Stanley’s house to stop the erosion inside. In the first week of October, he brought a group of 25 skilled electricians, plumbers, sheet rockers, and carpenters, who installed new plumbing electricity, sheet rock, floors, windows, doors, cabinets and appliances. In other words, they rebuilt Stanley’s house. Had this group have been charging for their normal services, it would have cost $15,000 a day, or nearly $90,000 for their labor. They also brought nearly $50,000 of donated material. I salute Smitty and his crew for their extraordinary dedication in helping Stanley Stewart’s family.

Now we pledge that the DeVos Sports Business Management Program, in conjunction with the National Consortium for Academics and Sports, will continue to build and rebuild homes in future trips that will allow at least some of the people who were wrenched away from their beloved City of New Orleans to return in comfort and safety.

I have never been more proud to work with any group than I have been with those who have devoted nearly six weeks of their time since last December. It shows that when you believe in what you can’t see, you can someday see it.

Richard Lapchick.

-Originally Posted October 19, 2007