Published Tue, Oct 20, 2009 02:00 AM Modified Mon, Oct 19, 2009 10:42 PM
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local_state/story/148999.html
Helping Shaw helps all
Most nights, Parker Kennedy's concerns center on ensuring that the capellini primavera is hot and the pinot grigio is chilled.
When you're the owner of a popular downtown restaurant, those things that keep the doors open are what have you walking the floor.
Recently, though, Kennedy has been thinking of ways to keep open the doors to one of Raleigh's oldest institutions -- and one of the nation's oldest historically black colleges.
That's what will have him walking the floor tonight, when he hosts a fundraiser for Shaw University at his Italian restaurant, Caffé Luna.
"I read the article in The N&O on Shaw's financial troubles, and it touched my heart," Kennedy told me Monday. "I wanted to help."
So, too, do many others. Kennedy and Tanya Wiley, Shaw's executive director of marketing and public relations, said a score of businesses have contributed moolah and products such as furniture to the cash-strapped school. Many of them got involved, Wiley said, because of Kennedy.
"Parker came to us and asked 'What can I do to help?'" Wiley said. "He rolled his sleeves up and got other companies to get on board."
Kennedy said that he is surprised by the "great outpouring of support," both locally and nationally, but that he was most impressed by the contributions from Shaw employees. "Some professors have given as much as $1,000," he said. "Considering their resources, that's a lot of money."
Wiley said Shaw's primary goal is to "retire student debt. The university has done a lot to help students who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to go to college. It extended itself to help those students," she said, but because of the recession, the school's endowment has shrunk, as have contributions from alumni.
Alumni, she emphasized, "are now stepping up their game."
They'd better.
I'll tell you what: Any Shaw alumni who aren't stepping up ought to be ashamed and should be barred at the gate when returning to the campus for homecoming Saturday. Turn around. Go home. We don't need ya.
Having grown up in a Baptist church in Rockingham, I remember the reverends Gilchrist, Sawyer and Diggs telling us -- as they passed the collection plates -- that part of our contributions would go to support Shaw University. Because of Shaw's current hard times, I now feel guilty for spending so much of the money my aunt gave me for church at King's Grocery on Now and Laters and Bubble Yum.
It would be a mistake to look at the aid being rendered unto Shaw as charity. The banks that are helping to ensure the school's survival benefit when college grads deposit fat paychecks -- $26,000 fatter than for high school grads -- in their institutions. Progress Energy benefits when the grads are able to pay their power bills. And hey, $26,000 more per year buys a lot of capellini primavera and pinot grigio.
Such enlightened self-interest doesn't diminish what Kennedy and the others are doing, but it should encourage the rest of us to do more.
barry.saunders@newsobserver.com or 919-836-2811
