Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2010 > January > 25 > Entry
Steve Hicks and the Rise Across Texas Challenge
The goal is $5 million. Already, donors have pledged $2 million. For one charity event.
Pick the right cause, at the right time, and one can line up the biggest names to back it.
And the news keeps on rolling in: You’ve probably already heard about the cross-state bike ride, slated for March 6-20. Or perhaps the launch party, set for Friday at the Mount Bonnell-area home of Sally and Mack Brown. (Drat! I will be out of town !)
It probably hasn’t sunk in, however, that, in a city where $1 million marks the outer limits for single-function fundraising, Hicks has already lined up $2 million and plans to pick up the other $3 million by the time the post-event buzz dies down later this year. Some of the Challenge dollars will go to other Rise Schools — which serves children with a developmental disability or delay — in Houston, Dallas and Corpus Christi. Yet the bulk of it will be devoted to building a stand-alone campus for the local Rise School, now housed, part-time, at a megachurch in Southwest Austin.
How does Hicks draft social superstars such as the Browns, Lance Armstrong, Gene Stallings, Kristin Armstrong, Tim McClure, Bart Knaggs, Evan Smith, Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Attorney General Greg Abbott, Comptroller Susan Combs, Rep. Carol Alvarado and a slew of state senators — Kirk Watson, Jeff Wentworth, Rodney Ellis and Dan Patrick?
“They’ve asked me for favors,” the soft-spoken, mostly introverted Hicks says. “This time, I’m asking for one favor. And I’m not asking for myself. Not one has said no. Everybody I approached has helped in some way.”
Fewer than two dozen riders are expected to make the full trip from the Louisiana border to Presidio near Big Bend. Yet 200 celebrities will pedal from the Rise School to the Salt Lick in Driftwood on March 10 (an estimated hour ride). The public is invited to join them.
Donna Stockton Hicks and Sally Brown got the financial ball rolling for the local Rise School, run by Mandy Myers, after a granddaughter of Longhorn legend and Austin businessman James Street was born with Down syndrome. Their first event took in $50,000. A visit to the school converted Steve Hicks.
“These children touched something inside of me,” he says. “There’s no pretense. No ‘me’ gene. When I was growing up, they would have taken those kids away from their parents to be institutionalized. Now they can be main-schooled, have jobs, live fairly normal lives.”
During the ride, not long after the March 2 Republican gubernatorial primary, Hicks and Perry will jointly celebrate their 60th birthdays at the Hyatt Lost Pines Resort near Bastrop.
“I hope I can look back and think: ‘That was a pretty cool deal when I turned 60 and made a little difference.’ ”
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