Initiative to inspire students
HOOSICK FALLS, N.Y. » Driving through Hoosick Falls, you may spot a billboard or two not trying to sell you anything.
Instead, the billboards are there to show local kids that they, like the Hoosick Falls residents featured on the boards, they, too, can achieve their dreams and be succesful in life.
The initiative is being funded by the non-profit JLS Foundation, the organization that started the Hometown Mentoring Program for graduates of Hoosick Falls Central School.
John Liporace of the JLS Foundation said that last week the two billboards went up on Route 22 and another on Route 7. They will remain up for four weeks.
Liporace said he thought of the idea to have the billboards featuring successful Hoosick Falls residents as a way to show local youth that area that they too can become successful and achieve their dreams.
“The JLS Foundation, a nonprofit that I founded, has been providing professional networking, mentoring and college scholarships to students at HFCS since 2005,” said Liporace. “One of the things we’ve learned is that when students from HFCS meet successful people from Hoosick Falls it inspires and empowers them. They start believing that if this person grew up in Hoosick Falls and went on to be successful then maybe I can, too. So, we wanted to figure out a way to shine a light on successful people from Hoosick Falls in a way that would reach the most students in the community. We think a billboard is a good way to do that.”
Liporace said the first billboards features Jessica Abramovich Kuron, a JLS Foundation scholarship winner who spent time in Washington D.C. as the director of operations and executive assistant to Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware.
“Our goal is to show students that you can come [to] a small community like Hoosick Falls where more than 50 percent of the students in the district are living below the poverty line and make a huge impact on the world. There are so many people from Hoosick Falls that have done just that,” said Liporace.
He came up with this idea because he thinks that roadside billboards will get a lot of attention from all kinds of people driving through the village.
“We want to be able to inspire the most students we can in the community,” said Liporace. “We’re on social media, of course, but we think billboards are still an effective way to reach a lot of people especially in a small community.”
Liporace said he also wanted to fund these as a way to let other students know more about his scholarship program through his foundation.
“We also want to let students know about the Hometown Network that we recently launched,” he said.” It’s a network of people from Hoosick Falls organized by profession and available to anyone who wants to build a professional network in a specific field. Students can go to www.thejlsfoundation.org and quickly sort through the network to find someone from Hoosick Falls working in a field of interest and connect with that person via email. We believe the hometown connection in Hoosick Falls is very powerful. People from Hoosick Falls want to help others from Hoosick Falls no matter the geographical or generational boundaries. Everyone that will be featured on our billboards will be part of the Hometown Network.”