Joe Kenny

Dear ActiveRain Family,
In years past it has been fairly easy for me to meet my target goal for the St. Baldrick’s foundation but this year it seems a little tougher. I have raised $895 to date with most of the donations coming through Facebook and donations from my Coldwell Banker office. My goal is $3000 and before I have my head shaved on March 13th I’m asking my fellow Rainers to donate what they can and or share the following link. http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/itsagoodlife I’m dedicating my fundraising and haircut to the family of Patrick McNamara a seventh grader who lost his battle in October to Ependymoma, Brain tumor.

Amy Hahn has answered the call and I’m asking each and every reader to follow in her footsteps. If each of us donated just a little bit to this worthy cause there would be fewer Patrick McNamara’s out there. Please help how ever you can, I want the children of our communities to be around a while. It's a good life.

Maybe this is just what the doctor ordered to get me back in the swing of writing and sharing what goes on in my life. I have been using my SendOutCards business as leverage to jumpstart my real estate business and like most of the prospecting activities I do I often wonder is what I’m doing really making an impact or should I be doing something else? I received my answer today and I’d like to share it with you.

I had a client who loved rehabbing and saving homes but couldn’t save his own home from the grip of the banks. I found one of his old projects in an old news article and thought I would cheer him up with sending him the card below.

Here is my answer:

Joe... DUDE!!! I got your card in the mail. What an awesome gesture, THANK YOU!

One thing I always say about houses is, they're an investment in ourselves. I wouldn't be the strong independent person I am today if I hadn't owned my own homes over the years. Our friends on Wall Street can run them all the way to zero, and make another $10 trillion along the way, but that's never gonna change.
Funny thing about that little Spanish house you captured on the card. I bought it just as I was moving to Florida full time in 1999, right after selling my home in River Forest. I couldn't stand to leave Chicago behind completely, and that little house in Villa Park was cheap enough to make keeping a second residence up there possible. It had already sold to some house-flipping Realtor for $115,000, so I offered him $20,000 to sell his contract to me. He said, "you haven't even seen the house inside yet!" I told him it didn't matter, that was the house I wanted, and I could fix anything it needed. So my girlfriend at the time thought I was crazy. We went through the house after he accepted my offer, and it was beat to death. The front porch roof and deck were collapsing, and the succo had complely fallen off the outside of the south wall. Inside, many of the plaster ceilings had fallen, and there was lathe showing on nearly every wall. The floors looked like a gravel driveway, and many of the plaster cove moldings had been destroyed by past roof leaks. My girlfriend had only known me since I'd retired from saving the old houses in Oak Park, so she didn't know what I could do. I had just had hernia surgury, so I wasn't moving 100%, but I went over to that house the day of closing and started working it like I was in my prime. I repaired all the plaster walls and ceilings while some stucco guys were reparing the outside of the house. I even custom made plaster knives to fit the old cove moldings, and ran them myself in new plaster (Durabond actually). Then I painted the entire interior in Benjamin Moore Regal Wall Satin Historic colors, and called the floor sanders. 3 weeks after closing on the house, Gretchen came out from the city on the train, and her legs litterally collapsed underneath her when she walked through the door. I will never forget the look on her face when she saw that sparkling interior with freshly sanded and stained floors. The porch and outside still looked terrible, but that came later. I'll never forget how satisfied I was with myself that I could still breath life into an old building as forlorn as that one was. Thank you for sending me that card, and reminding me what an exciting project that was. Another bonus was meeting one of my best friends there, who still lives right next door.

Thank you again,

It doesn’t matter who or what you have to say to people at times, just get out there and let people know you are there to serve their needs. It’s a good life.

March 13 2013 I will be shaving my head for the fourth straight year to help raise money for the St. Baldricks Foundation. St Baldricks is a foundation started to help raise money for cancer research for children. How St. Baldricks was started is listed below.

On March 17, 2000, reinsurance executives John Bender, Tim Kenny ( no relation of mine) and Enda McDonnell turned their industry's St. Patrick's Day party into a head-shaving event to benefit kids with cancer. Their 20 "shavee" recruits planned to raise "$17,000 on the 17th." Instead, they raised over $104,000!
The movement quickly grew into the world’s largest volunteer-driven fundraising program for childhood cancer research, and today the St. Baldrick's Foundation funds more in childhood cancer research grants than any organization except the U.S. government. Since 2000, more than 189,660 volunteers -- including over 17,200 women -- have shaved in solidarity with children with cancer at events in dozens of countries and every U.S. state. Thanks to generous friends and family, these shavees have raised over $117 million for life-saving research, and each is a walking billboard for the cause!
At St. Baldrick's events, people from all walks of life discover a power they didn't know they had...the power to bring hope and a future to the bravest kids in the world, and countless volunteers say, "St. Baldrick's is the best thing I've ever done to help someone."

So I’m asking you to take a few minutes out and consider donating to this great cause. My goal is to raise $3000 and hope that it benefits many children, especially the children of the Coldwell Banker and Active Rain real estate communities. Please click here. It’s a good life

St. Valentine’s day is tomorrow and the stores have been loaded with greeting cards, decorations and heart shaped chocolates and gifts for our loved ones to know how much they mean to us. The best gift for the heart of our loved ones is the following video. Watch physician researchers Gordon A. Ewy, MD, and Karl Kern, MD, demonstrate the easy, life-saving method that they developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. They have come up with a new CPR proceedure that could mean the differece between life and death. Don’t you want the people you love to be around for many Valentines Day? It’s a good life.

Tuesday morning I received a text message from my cousin Mike who owns Gibbon’s-Ellison Funeral Home, asking me if I could use four tickets for that nights Bulls game against the Suns. The last time I was at a Bulls game was in the early 90’s when Michael Jordan was in his hay day so I felt I was long overdue for a game and graciously accepted the offer. I asked how much the tickets were and was told not to worry about it and just have a good time.

I made a few calls to some of my Bulls fan friends and within a short amount of time the plans were made and the tickets received. The tickets I found out later were the creme dela creme of tickets. Parking, food and drink were all included. Nothing to do here but sit back ,enjoy a good game and enjoy the company of my friend Tony of Fox Valley Excavating, his eight year old son Patrick and Chuck one of Tony’s drivers.

The value of these tickets for me wasn’t all the frills that came along with them but the reflecting on where I was and how I got there. I have done a couple of favors for Mike in the past and Tony has done favors for me as well. Money has never been an issue in any of these cases because we are friends and we look out for each other. I like to think that everything comes full circle. I do something for you, you do something for me and I then pay it forward to someone else.

Tony must have thanked me a dozen times throughout the course of the night. He plowed my driveway last winter when we were out of town during the blizzard and he is thanking me for some basketball tickets, wow! It is a good life.