A Message From The President: 5K Projects Is Here
It was a Sunday in May of 2019, and I was sitting in my car getting some work in on the weekend to lighten my load for the upcoming week. In the quiet solitude of my car my mind started to race about the idea of philanthropy, and the thought of creating something new started to fill my mind with a flurry of ideas. I raced home and started to spurt out a multitude of random thoughts to Lacey, which she simply wrote down to make them real. Over the next two months I fine-tuned a proposal to offer to the people I sought the most help from in the creation of this charitable venture, with these people simply being my parents and my sister. July 4th, 2019 we sat at a parade in downtown Summerlin, Nevada and we returned home to cookout for the remainder of the day with two important tasks on the agenda. First, my sister Emily devised her own way to reveal that Lacey and I were having a boy, who ended up being born October 24, 2019 happy and healthy. After the intense emotion of the reveal had subsided a little I got ten poster boards and set them up on a chair, and cleared my throat.
“I came up with an idea, and I need help fine tuning it and making it real. I truly feel like the non-profit sector has a chance at offering the change the world desperately needs, and its time to create a new spin on it. I want to streamline donations and create a linear structure between the donor and the recipient of the charitable act. At the same time, I want the charity to offer real expectations, and show donors that any amount can be made into something. The focus of the donations will be towards small communities around the country, and the total for the projects will be $5,000.” My mother, father, sister and wife sat there and contemplated the idea, and within minutes a full-blown conversation had sparked and what the discussion provided was a name and the spark we needed to start. 5K Projects was born that day, and we never looked back.
After completing all the necessary paperwork we submitted our application in December, and spent countless nights talking about what 5K could eventually become. I acquired the help of a longtime friend Pat Harris who designed a logo, and finalized it during that time. The five months between held a lot of challenges with the pandemic arising, but in May of 2020 a letter came back to us from the IRS that simply read, “5K Projects has been accepted as a 501c3 Non-Profit charity organization.” Almost a year to the day from the solitude of my car to our official designation, the small idea became real. The only thing left was to fine tune everything and release it to the world.
With the help of my friend Gavin Porter we created a website, social media and connected 5K to the world digitally, and prepared to unveil it. The world had changed a lot between the fifteen months that had passed, but the message stood strong. This charity was created by people for people from people. It was born out of the idea that non-profit charity still holds the keys to creating change that the general populace yearns for.
2021 mainly held a lot of movement for the whole team, including new career opportunities and new academic challenges. 5k Projects stayed in focus with the fall allowing time to finalize the release of to the public. With a collective sense of hope, December 2021 officially brought 5k Projects into the world.
Our vision for 5K sees projects in every state, in every community crossing all aspects of what we hold near and dear to our hearts. We want to help as many people as we can all over the country, with funding from people all over the country. Our vision is to create a community out of a country, one 5K Project at a time.