A Decade of Do Good Times

ON THE MALL CAMPUS LIFE

THE FEARLESS GENERATION

A Decade of Do Good Times

Student Competition Changed the Lives of Its Veterans—and Transformed Their Ventures

THE RUNAWAY SUCCESS of the university’s Do Good Challenge for the past 10 years has zero degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

It goes back to when Karen ’76 and husband Bruce Levenson called Robert Grimm, then director of the School of Public Policy‘s philanthropic and nonprofit program, to say their nephew was working with the actor—and he’d be happy to host a campus event. Grimm just needed to create one.

He, students and other faculty members, inspired by Bacon’s SixDegrees nonprofit connecting people and good causes, developed a competition encouraging Terp teams to create, volunteer for, advocate or raise money over eight weeks for a social need.

Bacon (above) soon donned a Fear the Turtle T-shirt to make a one-minute promotional video and agreed to help judge the six finalists for the inaugural Do Good Challenge in April 2012.

“We were worried no one would show up,” Grimm recalls. “We thought it would be the only one we put on.”

Instead, 100 teams participated in this social impact-focused mashup of “American Idol” and “Shark Tank.” Nearly 700 cheering students turned out to watch the finals, $5,000 was awarded to expand the fledgling Food Recovery

Network’s efforts, and 10 years later, the event is the center of a suite of efforts encouraging students to make a difference.

Mini grants, courses, “accelerator” fellowships, a graduate certificate program in nonprofit management, paid internships and coaching have built a pipeline—now based in UMD’s Do Good Institute—to support students’ projects and ventures. “These aren’t future leaders,” Grimm says. “They are leaders now, changing the world today.”

Students have taken on causes including cancer awareness, poverty, veterans with disabilities and sexual assault. Like the university’s Do Good initiatives, the nonprofits they launched have also evolved. Terp spoke to seven past participants about where they—and their Challenge efforts—are now. —LB, KS

See three more “where are they now” stories from Do Good competitors and find out who won the April 2022 event at terp.umd.edu.

Juan Bellocq M.P.P. ’13 and Fernando Sartiel M.P.P. ’12 Fundación Microjusticia Argentina

To Buenos Aires lawyer Juan Bellocq, working for a new nonprofit he’d heard was building houses for people living in slums sounded like more rewarding work than his job supporting the wealthy. Too bad that he didn’t have house-building skills.

What he did have was legal expertise, which inspired his 2010 creation of Fundación Microjusticia Argentina, which provides free legal support to vulnerable communities, especially women. He soon earned a Fulbright award to study nonprofit management at UMD to bolster his fledgling volunteer network.

There, he and new pal (and soon, fellow co-founder) Fernando Sartiel entered the 2013 Do Good Challenge with a grassroots fundraising effort for Microjusticia.

“Winning the challenge enabled us to get international recognition,” he says. That helped professionalize the organization and secure more donations, including a $180,000 grant from the United Nations’ Democracy Fund a few years later.

Microjusticia has since expanded to four provinces, and Bellocq has stepped away. He’s now legal adviser for the federal Social Security Agency and managing director and founder of Fundación IBAPP, a conservation nonprofit in Patagonia.

Matthew Hollister ’18 The James Hollister Wellness Foundation

Over the last six years, Matthew Hollister has saved lives in Ghana, Bolivia and Honduras, thanks to more than $90,000 worth of medicine his foundation has donated to clinics overseas.

It’s a silver lining after his father died from brain cancer when Hollister was a UMD freshman. His family was left with thousands of dollars of medication that due to liability issues had to be thrown away.

“That waste didn’t sit very well with me,” says Hollister. That’s when he created the James Hollister Wellness Foundation, named for his father, to collect unused medicine from hospitals, pharmacies and hospices to send to countries experiencing drug shortages.

The foundation received its first donation thanks to a mentor’s connection during the 2015 Do Good Challenge—and the following year, Hollister won the grand prize and audience choice award, walking away with $6,500.

“With the money and the connections we were able to expand at a breakneck pace,” he says. Today, the foundation has served more than 50,000 people, and Hollister is developing a for-profit ecommerce platform for pharmacies to further reduce drug waste.

Vanessa Barker ’20 and Cate Law ’19 Pawsible Inc.

It was a $500 mini-grant from the Do Good Institute that made “pawsible” Vanessa Barker’s initial goal of providing pet food and supplies to UMD students raising service dog puppies.

“The college experience is really amazing for these dogs, because they get to have all these experiences around campus that a working adult would have to try really hard to create,” says Barker. “But some of our peers were going hungry so they could buy dog food,” since puppy raisers assume all financial responsibility for the dogs for up to two years.

While her efforts with friend Cate Law didn’t win the 2019 Challenge, additional Do Good grants and Barker’s time as a

Do Good Accelerator fellow put

Pawsible on the path to become an official nonprofit in 2020—just in time to meet the growing financial need that emerged during the pandemic. Now,

Pawsible’s reach extends across the country, paying for vet bills, toys and other puppy-raising essentials to ensure people with disabilities continue to get the tail-wagging support they need.

Audrey Awasom ’18 Noble Uprising

Audrey Awasom knew it was time to journey into entrepreneurship when she found herself doing more work on her passion project than her homework. “I wanted to know how I could create an actual organization and to scale the impact of the project.”

Enter the Do Good Institute. Using its grants, mentors and classes, she founded Noble Uprising, which provides food and sanitary items, basic literacy and soft skills education, and technical training to help women experiencing poverty get jobs and transform their lives. Her organization has delivered more than 9,000 care package items and served 87 women, and a partnership with the Prince George’s County Family Justice Center will expand its reach to hundreds of families.

The institute’s Impact Interns program has been a particular boon to Awasom as Noble Uprising has grown. Its research informed her 10-year growth plan and helped her expand programming, such as creating a network of food pantries women can access conveniently, without barriers like applications or appointments.

“We’re able to create programs that meet the needs of individuals where they are,” she says.