The Darfur Heroes program, started in 2007 by the coalition, highlights individuals and groups who play a crucial role in helping end the violence in Darfur through awareness-raising and other efforts. This month, Save Darfur is honoring college student Jon Brian for his work to educate his community and raise money for 
Darfur advocacy by refurbishing and auctioning off a car. Check out his story below:
Initial Idea-
Throughout high school, I had many classes such as Leadership, AVID, and Civics that required community service hours in order to pass. Personally, I never had trouble getting enough hours but I noticed that others were having trouble finding service to perform. One day, on my way home from volunteering at the Senior Citizen Center I starting thinking that there must be a form of service that was more suited to people’s interests.
My good friend Willie Berger and I shared an interest in cars so I began to think of how we could use that interest to help others. When I spoke with him about the idea, we decided that we should raise money for a car and parts to go on it. Because donations would be tax deductible and for a good cause, we believed that we could get a discount on many parts which would in turn help us sell the car for a greater profit. We could install these parts ourselves, thus saving thousands in labor costs. Our main goal was to sell the car for more than we put into it, thereby raising more money than would have been otherwise possible. This also gave people something tangible to donate too. Once we had the idea, we began talking to more friends and pretty soon had a solid group to work on the car.
Darfur-
After knowing what we wanted to do to help, we had to decide where to send the aid. It was my fourth year in Debate, and throughout the class, my teacher Mrs. Gray had introduced us to a huge variety of world issues. The three of which i felt most passionate about were the war in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, and the war in the Congo. After talking with Willie we settled on Darfur for many reasons. It was an issue that had been gathering attention at our school in past year and that we could continue to educate people about.
Setting up the organization-
Our first move was to establish a group of trusted sponsors to invest in our idea. This first place that we went was to Goodguys Rod and Custom organization. We chose them because they hosted 4 large events in our area every year and because they had a long list of connections in the automotive world. When we met with them we discovered that this issue was recognized by the public even less than we had anticipated. After presenting them with the facts about Darfur, they were quick to lend us a helping hand. It was a similar process with most of the organizations we met with. Our most frequently asked question was what is Darfur?
Spreading the Word-
When we set up our booth at the first Goodguys event we saw almost no visitors for a long time. Many people walked by our booth but not too many stopped to share their support. This was not because people did not want to help, but because they did not know what we were all about. As we started talking to people, they started getting more interested and although donations were slow, we were having a much larger impact on our area. The news about what we were doing was quickly spreading throughout our school and our effort began to gain momentum. I believe that our most successful act of raising awareness was when we were featured on Channel 4 News. This gave us our first real opportunity to reach out to a larger audience and let them know that there is a situation across the world that needs out help.
The most important lesson that we took away from this project was that the best way to help the world at large is through a medium that you are interested in. For us, the best way was through the automotive world. When you are truly interested in an area of service, it will come through to others and they will get excited as well.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Save Darfur Coalition.
Tags: Darfur Hero
