Country stars helping neighbors in need
Posted: Friday, November 13, 2009 2:48 PM by Petra Cahill
Filed Under:
Making a Difference
Joo Lee, NBC News producer
BATON ROUGE, La. – In his trademark black cowboy hat and worn blue jeans, country music star Tim McGraw is right at home under the hot stage lights. But on a recent night outside Pittsburgh, he was turning the spotlight away from himself and raising money for a good cause.
"This goes to the Neighbor's Keeper fund. Mine and my wife's charity that we started a while back," McGraw said to the audience.
McGraw calls his benefit concerts "bread and water" shows. "Typically when we do these shows, it'll cost you $100 for the Neighbor's Keeper to do a request. But if it's really bad, it costs you $200 for us to stop," he said with a laugh.
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| Larry Busacca / Getty Images |
| Singers Faith Hill and Tim McGraw at the 2009 MusiCares event in Los Angeles on Feb. 6, 2009. |
Asked how much money these concerts can raise, McGraw responded, "Playing badly, we can raise a lot!"
McGraw and his wife, country singer Faith Hill, founded the Neighbor's Keeper Fund in 2004 to strengthen communities in need, particularly by contributing to projects that support children’s initiatives. The non-profit organization contributes to diverse projects. They've raised money for Habitat for Humanity in Nashville and supported a youth baseball league in Rayville, La.
Between 2005-2007 Neighbor’s Keeper Fund raised more than $2.5 million, according to public charity tax records.
For McGraw, the idea was simple, "You know, you got to look out for your neighbor. And Faith and I both came from families like that," said McGraw. "If somebody was in trouble, the neighbors were there to help."
The idea of Neighbor’s Keeper is to be able to target funds directly to a problem, often by donating to charitable groups that are already doing good work in an area. "Without any red tape. Without any overhead. Without any committee. We can just identify something and go straight to it," he explained.
Helping neighbors in need
That simple idea of helping communities in need took on new meaning after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the area both McGraw and Hill call home.
"Faith's from Mississippi and I'm from Louisiana," said McGraw, explaining how the focus of the project evolved after the deadly hurricane, particularly because it affected so many relatives and friends.
After Katrina hit, there was a lot of coverage about displacement and the loss of life, but McGraw felt that inadequate attention was being paid to the children who lived through such a traumatic event.
"We thought the best way that we could [help] was to find a community of people, an organization, that was really addressing mental health situations for children," said McGraw.
That’s where Sister Judith Brun, the executive director of the nonprofit "
Community Initiatives Foundation" in Baton Rouge, stepped in. She had already started a program in Baton Rouge to help children work through their troubling emotional problems after the storm. "We found that these children who had been traumatized responded beautifully to expressive therapy, particularly art therapy," said Brun.
Through the Neighbor's Keeper Fund, McGraw and Hill contributed $1 million to Brun’s organization to support programs that provide art therapy, education and other services to children and families displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Brun's organization works with over 250 households in the Baton Rouge area.
Brun explained how art helped many children express emotions that they otherwise couldn’t communicate verbally.
"These children didn't have a rich vocabulary to tell their story," said Brun."So it's very hard for them to express their heart. It's very hard for them to express what's really troubling them. But if you look at their art, you could see that they could communicate very clearly."
She showed us some of the drawings. "This is tragically enough a body floating in terribly murky water, that most of these children saw, but the child who drew this experienced tremendous relief … [by getting] it out on paper."
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| Leo Bonamy |
| Sister Judith Brun works with children in the Baton Rouge area. |
Making ‘a lifetime of difference’
With the funds from McGraw’s
and Hill’s foundation, Brun's organization also
is able to provide counseling to many adults still struggling to rebuild their lives in the hurricane
-battered area. "We have seen some very distressed and very despondent adults, deeply depressed. As a matter of fact, almost 70 percent of our heads of household experience either significant depression or some diagnosable difficulty."
Lolita Williams is one of those people who is still trying to rebuild her life. "Mentally it's still going on. It don't matter if it was four years ago. It's still happening," she said.
In order to reach both the children and their parents, Brun started a program that hosts counseling sessions for a group of mothers while their children go to art therapy sessions.
And the women are making big strides. "To see them come in with a bright face, you know looking a little better, happy to be here… it's just very rewarding," Brun said.
Much of the credit goes to the generous support the organization has received from the Neighbor’s Keeper Fund, she said. "Our hope is, because we have been able to intervene, not just immediately but on a longer term, that we really will have the opportunity through Tim and Faith's generosity to make a lifetime of difference."
Video: McGraws turns spotlight onto hurricane recovery
Read a blog from Tim McGraw: "Every day you can make a difference"
Click here for more information about the "Neighbor’s Keeper Fund"
Click here for more on the Nightly News special series on Celebrities Making a Difference.
