Uplifting Athletes is a non-profit organization of current American college football players, benefiting those with rare diseases. The group was established in 2003 and is a 501(c)3.
The organization was founded in 2003 by a group of Penn State Nittany Lions football players who turned an annual weightlifting competition into a fundraiser. Wide receiver Scott Shirley's father was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2003. When Shirley turned to his teammates for support, he discovered three others also had fathers battling the disease. Because so few (less than 200,000) Americans are diagnosed with kidney cancer, funds to fight the disease are scarce. Two of Shirley's teammates, offensive tackle Damone Jones and center Dave Costlow, saw an opportunity for student-athletes to use their high-profile and access to the media to promote awareness and raise funds for under-served charities. The three formed Uplifting Athletes later that year.
Read more about Uplifting Athletes: Chapters, Uplifting Athletes Rare Disease Champion
Famous quotes containing the words uplifting and/or athletes:
“If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman’s industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)