HIGH HONORS FOR HILL’S HELPERS!
’AAF jock’s foundation fete unites donors, beneficiaries
The Greg Hill Foundation is celebrating 2,841 days of aiding people facing tragedy in our community, and it’s throwing a shindig on March 22 to mark the occasion.
“So many of the people who give to the foundation do so when they’re driving into work and hear a story on the radio,” Greg Hill told the Track.
“We’ve gotten in the habit, when we reached almost a year of the foundation’s existence, of bringing donors together with beneficiaries so that they could see and hear the stories of those they had helped,” added the host of WAAF’s morning show.
The annual event, which will take place at Boston’s UMass Club, will feature a silent auction, a couple of awards to honor folks who have supported the foundation, and a catch-up sesh about what the foundation has been up to in the past year, as told by their beneficiaries.
Although Hill stressed that all of the beneficiaries’ stories are special to him, he did mention the most recent example of the foundation’s work: helping a football coach at Oxford High School who reached out to him on Twitter asking for help with a family who lost everything they owned in a house fire.
“He talked about the fact that both the mother and the father were Iraq War veterans, and the son that he had on the football team was an amazing kid,” Hill said. “We went right on the air with that and ended up raising over $18,000 for that family.”
“To be able to write a check so they can find a place to live, so they can buy clothes for the kids to wear and go to school, to me, that kind of thing really stands out,” he added.
And even more remarkable, Hill pointed out, is that many of the people who have received help have paid it forward in one way or another.
“It’s the most amazing thing,” he said. “These people go through some of the most horrible, tragic, horrific things that can happen to a human being, and to be able to hear how they’ve found some way to turn that back into a positive and to use that energy to affect other people’s lives going forward is extraordinary.”