(March 26) Once again, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees is proving that good people who are good leaders do good things. He and his wife Brittany continue to be tremendous blessings to their adopted city.
With the entire world’s highest growth rate in coronavirus cases, the Crescent City is now becoming the epicenter, for the third time in 15 years, of a major catastrophe. The great Mississippi River seaport recovered from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and from the BP oil spill in 2010, and it now faces devastation of a different sort.
That’s where the Brees family comes in. Just as the NFL’s all-time quarterback statistical leader did after Katrina, when he spent years convening business leaders to help catalyze more effective recovery efforts, he and Brittany again are answering the call of a city in need. Not only will they donate $5 million this year to the city and the state of Louisiana to help alleviate hardships caused by the contagion, but they are doing it in a very focused way.
“After considerable research and conversations with local organizations,” they announced, “we will be mobilizing our partnerships with Second Harvest Food Bank, Ochsner Health Systems, Walk-Ons, Jimmy Johns, Smalls Sliders and Waitr to prepare and deliver over 10,000 meals per day throughout Louisiana for as long as it takes to children on meal programs, seniors, and families in need.”
It’s not just the generosity, but also the “considerable research,” the preparation, the insistence on real effectiveness and actual deliverability that is Brees’s hallmark.
“A lot of people have a foundation just to have a foundation,” Mark Brunell, Brees’s onetime backup, told Sports Illustrated a decade ago. “Drew has a foundation that does all kinds of things. The guy cares. He’s genuine.”
Well, here’s hoping that athletes, entertainers, and people of means in every walk of life follow Brees’s example….
