Sometimes nice things happen to people who do good deeds.
That’s what Kate Geagan and her sister Eileen Hopper found out when they attended a video taping of Oprah Winfrey’s “Ultimate Favorite Things” in November.
The Parkites, who co-founded the Chier Foundation, which pays the college fees for Sudanese refugees living in Utah, were singled out by Winfrey and showered with gifts. They included Jessica Leigh earrings, Apple iPads, custom tins of popcorn from Garrett’s in Chicago, an Herb-Savor by Prepara, Centerville chicken pies, Talbott Teas and a matching tea set, a custom set of Le Creuset cast iron pots and pans and mini croissants from Williams-Sonoma.
They also received the keys to two 2012 Volkswagon Beetles.
As the gifts kept coming (see accompanying story for the complete 2010 list of “Oprah’s Ultimate Favorite Things”), Geagan and Hopper wondered if it would be OK to auction some of the items off to benefit their foundation.
Then someone in the audience asked that very question.
“Oprah replied, ‘You can do what you want, but I hope you will accept the gifts in the spirit in which I’m giving them to you,'” Geagan said during an interview with The Park Record. “‘And that spirit is the fact that I want to shower you with the excitement and the possibility of something so outside your realm of expectation happening to you, because of everything you do for other people. So I hope you will keep some of the gifts, if not all of the gifts. Because today I’m celebrating you.'”
Now, a couple of months later, Geagan and Hopper are still debating what to do with some of the gifts, said Hopper.
“We’re still reeling from what happened,” she said. “I’ve never won anything before and to win the cars and diamond earrings was magical.”
Hopper and Geagan were invited to appear on “Ultimate Favorite Things” after Geagan sent an email Winfrey.
“Back in May, I read Oprah’s 10th-anniversary-issue magazine,” Geagan remembered. “As I was reading and interview with her, it came clear to me she seemed very tired of her multiple responsibilies. The interviewer asked, ‘What still makes you happy?’ and she said, ‘It still makes my day when a viewer emails me after a show and says ‘that mattered to me.'”
After reading the article, Geagan emailed Winfrey and said her 2001 show about the Lost Boys of Sudan inspired her to establish the Chier Foundation.
“The characters of these men, to be orphaned when they were 5 or 6 by a civil war, and having to walk 1,000 miles across some of the most brutal, unforgiving conditions imaginable from Sudan to Ethiopia to Kenya, while losing half of the people who made the trip with them and still emerge as human beings with grace, hope and compassion stuck with me,” Geagan said. “I have met more than 200 of these men and they are extraordinary.”
The email to Winfrey was about Geagan’s experience with some of these Lost Boys and what the Chier Foundation does.
“I wrote, ‘Because of you we have sent more than 60 of these young men to college and have given out more than $200,000,'” Geagan said.
A few days later, Geagan and Hopper received an email inviting them to the taping of “Ultimate Favorite Things.”
“They had made it clear to us we had two tickets to the audience and we would only be in the audience,” Hopper said. “So we didn’t know what to expect.”
Then the gifts started coming, which made Hopper a little uncomfortable.
“It was as process from changing my mind set from ‘This could be about the Chier Foundation’ to ‘This is for us. This is about her giving stuff to us,'” she said. “Once it sank in, it was overwhelming.”
Hopper and Geagan officially started the foundation with Kelley Wolf in the winter of 2005, but the seed was planted four years prior.
“Kate was living in Boston in 2001 and watched the Oprah episode about the Lost Boys of Sudan and she reached out to this group of refugees in the Boston area,” Hopper said. “She then moved to Park City and was informed that one of the Lost Boys in Boston had a relative in Salt Lake City. And that’s how she got plugged in to the community here.”
In November, 2005, while Wolf was planning a holiday party, she talked with Geagan and Hopper about turning the party into an unofficial fundraiser for the Lost Boys.
“We had the idea for everyone to bring a gift,” Hopper said. “But we asked some of the boys what they really wanted and they told us they needed money for education. So we changed our request.”
The three women raised $20,000 at the party and set up applications to divvy out the money.
“The next thing we knew, we were an established a non-profit organization,” Hopper said.
The foundation helps these students attend Salt Lake Community College, Westminster College, Weber State University, Everest College and the University of Utah.
“We also have some out-of-state at graduate school, whom we help with book purchases,” Hopper said. “We helped them at the U. and when they went on to grad school and we decided they were still part of the Lost-Boys community in Salt Lake. So we decided to help them as well.”
The money is paid directly to the schools, said Geagan.
“That relieves them of the burden of having to choose between using the money to take classes or sending it home to help their sick family members,” she said. “This way, they can focus on their education, because a lot of these boys were forced to stop college because they had to send money they received from others home to relatives in the refugee camps.”
The Chier Foundation pays for books and tuition, Geagan said.
“So far we’ve given out $214,000 in total donations,” she said. “And our goal this year is to fund the whole spring semester for 30 Lost Boys, which means we need to raise about $25,000 to $30,000. And that can be anything from someone donating $50 for a book, or $375 for a class to $1,000 for one student semester. When people donate, 99 cents of each dollar goes directly to our mission,” Hopper said. “They are literally turning a refugee into a college graduate.”
Hopper is still thinkinking about how to utilize the gifts she and Geagan received from Winfrey.
“We may still do some sort of auction, but some of the edible gifts have already been enjoyed,” she said with a laugh.
To donate to the Chier Foundation, visit www.chierfoundation.org or send a check to the Chier Foundation at P.O. Box 681626, Park City, Utah, 84068.