Believe Project offers some needed cash
Carolyn Gable was once a struggling single mom working long hours as a waitress in Chicago to make ends meet.
But after years of scraping by, she landed a job at a trucking company and worked her way up until she was running her own multimillion-dollar business.
Now, she spends the holiday season giving back to families in need of a helping hand and a bit of hope.
Each day of December, Gable provides a crisp $100 bill to a deserving recipient with the Believe Project. It launched roughly five years ago in the suburbs of Chicago.
This year, Gable is bringing it to the Phoenix area, with some administrative help from The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com.
The project started with a random act of kindness.
Gable was waiting in line to buy gifts for her grandchildren at a school event when she overheard a woman say she’d been taking care of her granddaughter since her daughter died of cancer. Her granddaughter had since been diagnosed with cancer, too, and she had only $15 to spend on her presents.
Gable wanted to jump in and buy the gifts for her, but she couldn’t. “I didn’t have the courage,” she said. Instead, she sent the school’s principal a $100 bill for the woman’s family. The principal called her in tears, and the granddaughter sent Gable a letter of gratitude.
“One hundred dollars is not going to
change their life,” Gable said. “However, it can give them hope. It can give them inspiration that, ‘I do have value, I am loved, I am a part of something bigger.’” The Believe Project was born.
Do you have a friend, neighbor, coworker, family member or someone else in mind who could use $100? Tell us why. Gable will sort through all the submissions and choose the recipients.
Thirty-one $100 bills will be given out, one for each day of December.
Each recipient will be given a tiny light-pink envelope with “Believe” scripted across it — inside is the $100 bill, along with quote cards to inspire. The recipient will pass it on to the person who was nominated.
The ultimate goal is to encourage others to donate to the campaign, Gable said. The more money there is to give, the more help there is that can be provided.
A few years ago, The Believe Project, in cooperation with the Daily Herald in
Arlington Heights, Illinois, was giving back well into the spring season. Rather than choosing just 30 recipients for the $3,000 available, the project gave out $14,400 to 136 winners in more than 60 Chicago suburbs thanks to reader donations.
The project has given out at 5,000 envelopes since it started.
“I believe that people who have money want to give money, but they don’t know what to give it to,” Gable said. “Maybe they’ll see this and think, ‘Maybe this is something we should be a part of.’”
Gable, now a mother of seven and grandmother to four, wasn’t always as fortunate.
For 12 years, she worked as a waitress least in downtown Chicago, supporting her two kids.
Then, “by the grace of God,” Gable said, she got a job at a local trucking company despite having no experience or education.
“Once the double doors open in your life, I think you know ‘This is it,’” Gable said. “Then you just have to work at it.”
That’s what she did, earning a promotion from customer service to a sales position and eventually moving on to work for a leading freight company.
In 1989, Gable started her own company, New Age Transportation.
By the time she sold it almost 30 years later — in May of this year — it was worth millions.
Gable went on to write a book about her journey titled, “Everything I know as a CEO I Learned as a Waitress,” which published in 2007.
In addition to the Believe Project, Gable founded the Expect a Miracle Foundation to help single-parent families.
“I was more an underdog in my life than I was a success, so my heart still goes out to people like that,” she said.