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Photo by Erica Techo.
A student buys ice cream from the Bendy's ice cream truck on Oct. 11. The food truck was on campus at Mountain Brook High School as part of Raise MB's first fundraiser, a food truck rally, during which students could purchase food directly from the vendors in addition to donating to the Raise MB organization.
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Photo by Erica Techo.
Mountain Brook High School students collect donations at a Food Truck Rally hosted by Raise MB. The organization was formed after Relay for Life was disbanded.
Editor's note: This article was updated Oct. 26, 2017 at 4:38 p.m. to include additional information from the American Cancer Society.
Mountain Brook High School has long been known for its lofty fundraising goals and steadfast support of Relay for Life, the national nonprofit that is the signature fundraiser for the American Cancer Society.
Each year, MBHS’s Relay team has fundraised hundreds of thousands of dollars, adding up to millions over the 17 years their school has participated. But this year, that is going to change.
“We started to notice there was a pretty steep decline in the student body’s participation [in Relay],” said Katie Pharo, a senior at MBHS.
The school’s fundraising peaked about six years ago, and while they still had lofty fundraising goals — around $200,000 the last two years — students were not as eager to participate. Pharo, along with other students, would hear her peers talking about how they were disappointed in the American Cancer Society.
Students saw reports on how much money ACS spent on salaries, advertisements and other expenses, Pharo said, and thought it was not right that so little of their donations were going toward cancer research.
According to ACS Senior Director of Community Engagement Ginny Tucker, however, ACS is funding more than $7.6 million in cancer research grants in Birmingham, and research that takes place across the country can in turn benefit the Birmingham community.
According to the American Cancer Society, 75 percent of money goes to program services — cancer research, patient support, information and education and detection and treatment — and 25 percent of money goes to supporting services — management, general expenses and fundraising expenses.
In 2016, the American Cancer Society provided services to 1,821 cancer patients and provided 27,748 patient support programs to the Greater Birmingham area (Bibb, Blount, Chilton, Fayette, Jefferson, Shelby, St. Clair, Talladega and Walker counties), according to numbers provided by ACS.
While there is no nationally recognized standard for how much a charity should spend on its programs versus its overhead costs, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance requires charities to spend at least 65 percent on charitable missions to be accredited, with no more than 35 percent of their expenses being overhead. Another watchdog, CharityWatch, categorizes a group as satisfactory if at least 60 percent of spending goes towards programs, and the group gets a top rating if 75 percent of expenses are used for its programs.
“I think when we started hearing that, it’s obviously a really big issue,” Pharo said, of how students viewed the American Cancer Society’s spending practices. “And they [other students] took time out of their own days to research that sort of thing.”
So students decided to shift their focus toward local charities. They got together over the summer and launched the idea of Raise MB — a year-round fundraising organization that will host monthly fundraisers for the charity of its choosing.
They had 111 students apply to join Raise MB, Pharo said, and aim to garner as much support as Relay for Life saw each year.
“We hope to have a really big Relay-like event,” Pharo said. “The night of Relay was a time where all the kids would have something they were doing. … It’s a community-wide event.”
The high number of applicants, Pharo said, showed how much Mountain Brook students want to give back.
“Among the students, it’s been really, really encouraging,” she said.
Students involved in Raise MB were given the opportunity to vote on a charity to support in their inaugural year, and the vote was almost unanimous.
This year, Raise MB will support the Sid Strong Foundation.
“Everybody heard about his story, and I think it was just a huge ordeal [for Mountain Brook], so a lot of people wanted to give back to Sid and his legacy,” Pharo said.
Sid Ortis would have been a senior at Mountain Brook High School this year. He died in 2015 after a 15-month battle with cancer, and his family and friends established the Sid Strong Foundation in his memory. The foundation aims to carry on Sid’s legacy and a prayer he said with friends before he died — to remain strong in their faith by following the path of righteousness and to live prosperous lives.
All funds raised by the Sid Strong Foundation stay local, said Scott Ortis, Sid’s father The Sid Strong Foundation is made up of all volunteers, Ortis said, so there is no overhead cost to worry about — all donations will go to Children’s. They also seek out and vet the different research going on in cancer, he said, and will focus their attention on pediatric cancers, which get significantly less funding than adult cancers.
After hearing that MBHS would turn its fundraising efforts toward a local cause, and for that cause to be the Sid Strong Foundation, Ortis said he was overjoyed.
“It thought it was just huge,” Ortis said. “… I’m very honored and pleased that they still remember Sid. To be honest with you, as a parent, it was big.”
Based on the amount MBHS has raised in the past, even just a fraction of that could prove extremely helpful locally, Ortis said.
“Over the last several years, they’ve probably averaged over $200,000,” he said. “And I don’t know if they’ll reach that, I kind of doubt that they will, but if they even make half of that, that’s a huge amount of donations to us, and that will eventually go to research that year after year after year wasn’t done.”
The reaction of the Ortis family has also been exciting for the students, Pharo said, and the decision has been well received at the school.
“It’s been pretty unanimous amongst the student body [to support Sid Strong], and we actually have a couple of teachers right now who are fighting cancer at the high school, and I think they’re happy to see us shift to a more local platform,” Pharo said.
Students will approach her in the hallway to ask, “Is Relay really not a thing?” Pharo said, and rather than have a sad reaction, she said they normally excitedly ask, “So where’s the money going?”
Initially, Raise MB was going to have a new vote each year, opening up the option to switch the beneficiary on a regular basis. But after seeing the support they have for the Sid Strong Foundation, Pharo said there is a chance it stays on as a long-running beneficiary.
“I think we’re just very, very excited about this year,” she said. “And with the community’s help, which I don’t think is going to be a problem, I know we can makea difference.”