One Person Can Make a Difference – March 13, 2010

Anything is possible.

Even though I've been saying it for eight years, my students still have trouble believing it, especially with some of the great challenges they've faced in their lives. At times, I'll admit it's hard to sell this message of hope when a student tells me something like, "I'm poor, Mister. I can't go to college. I have to work to help my family."

When faced with such comments, I refer to the long list of people who have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds and become successful, proving with their lives that anything is possible.

Helen Keller lost her hearing and sight as a baby, but she managed to graduate from Radcliffe College and became a world-famous speaker and author.

Stephen Hawking suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease and since the age of 21 has been almost fully paralyzed, but he's become one of the best-known scientists in the world and is considered to be one of the greatest minds in physics since Albert Einstein.

Oprah Winfrey was born to poor, unwed, teenage parents in rural Mississippi, but that didn't stop her from becoming one of the most influential women in the world and the world's first black female billionaire.

"But they're old people," I’ve often heard my students say in reply, or they’ll say something along the lines of, "We don’t know anybody around here who's done anything."

Last week, that changed when my kids saw for themselves, in our own school, that anything is possible.

Like most schools across the country, my high school, Southeast Whitfield, is suffering from massive budget cuts caused by the economic downturn. There's not enough money for the essentials, let alone extras, such as new athletic equipment, but that didn't discourage the head of our school's physical education department, Carrie Burch, from trying to acquire the equipment. After all, anything is possible

In the fall, Carrie heard about a contest by the professional football team, the Atlanta Falcons. The contest involved students from schools across the state of Georgia filling out registration forms and turning them in at locations of a national sporting goods chain. The school with the most completed forms would win.

Carrie's enthusiasm spread to her staff and throughout the student body, and last month, the principal of our high school received a phone call from the Falcons, saying that Southeast had won the contest. In fact, it was the highest amount of forms ever received in the contest.

And the prize? The sponsors of the contest donated $5,000 of apparel to our school’s athletic teams and another $5,000 in cash, most of which will be used for the much-needed equipment for the physical education department, equipment that Carrie told me the school could never have afforded.

To celebrate the victory, members of the Falcon organization, including two cheerleaders and the team mascot, Freddie the Falcon, visited Southeast to throw a pep rally.

All too often, we tell ourselves that we can’t do something. "...I'm too old. I'm too young. I'm too poor. I don't have any connections..."

But, the world is full of examples that show clearly that anything is possible and that one person can truly make a difference. If Carrie Burch can get $10,000 of new athletic equipment in the midst of one of the worst recessions in decades, what can you and I accomplish with a little ingenuity, hard work and faith?