Award for DePaul Cristo Rey

Challenge Accepted! Award goes to...

DePaul Cristo Rey

Ahead of the March 2019 Challenge Accepted event, I’m sure many IABC and community members knew little or nothing about DePaul Cristo Rey High School. I acknowledged that in my Challenge Accepted presentation, “Creating a Local Identity and Support Base for an Innovative National Education Model.” And I shared the ongoing challenges of launching and marketing a private high school unlike any other in Greater Cincinnati.

Participating in this event provided an immediate benefit as valuable as the monetary prize donation – a roomful of people learned more about the school, which ambitiously aims to support young people to move from poverty to bright futures through a college-prep education and innovative Corporate Work Study Program. Audience members posted comments on social media, guests came to me with questions and comments. DPCR later asked the Challenge Accepted emcee, Mary Wineberg, to be the guest speaker at our May Commencement. There were many immeasurable benefits to having accepted the challenge.

Of course, most tangible was the $1,000 IABC donation to my charity of choice – DePaul Cristo Rey. The other school leaders and I agreed it was fitting to put it toward a long-overdue school communication challenge – upgrading our web site. The site hadn’t been significantly upgraded since it was launched in 2010 ahead of the school opening. Grant funding underwrote redesign costs and months of planning work had already happened.

However, the work of rewriting content and creating new pages was being juggled between multiple other priorities among a small staff team. The IABC donation allowed us to supplement a small stipend for our part-time graphic designer to work on this outside of DPCR and provided another stipend for a teacher to facilitate content for the academic areas.

The site launched late this summer and if you visit http://www.depaulcristorey.org you can see the donation results for yourself.