In early 1997, Cleon Daskalakis, a former professional hockey player and the Founder and President of Celebrity Marketing, Inc., a sports marketing and event production firm, was watching a feature story on the local news about the struggles of a family with a young son who was seriously ill and, to enable him to get around, needed a special wheelchair and ramp for their home. Moved by the story, Mr. Daskalakis wanted to help and he assumed that given the clients he represented and the many friends that he had who were professional athletes, that it would be relatively easy to conduct a fundraiser to amass the approximately $25,000 that was necessary to assist this family.

What he found were numerous state and federal statutes regarding, among other things, charitable fundraising, tax status, and something called a 501(c)(3). While Mr. Daskalakis, and others, were eventually able to raise the funds necessary to assist this family and their child, the process had impressed upon him the need for a better way for celebrities;to achieve their philanthropic aspirations.

In November of 1997, after researching various options, Mr. Daskalakis, under the auspices of the National Heritage Foundation, founded the Celebrities For Charity Foundation. The Foundation’s two primary goals were, and still are, to assist celebrities in fulfilling their philanthropic aspirations and to increase the access that charities have to celebrities and the tremendous benefits that this access can provide to them.

In the beginning, Mr. Daskalakis utilized the sports related events that his firm produced for others to raise funds for CFC. These funds were used to purchase various types of sports memorabilia, which he then had his clients and friends autograph. In doing so, he was able to significantly increase, often more than a hundred times, the original value of these items. A hockey puck or baseball purchased for a couple of dollars could now be auctioned off by a charity for over $100, a $1.25 photo could raise as much as $135, and a $25 hockey stick or baseball bat could raise $225.

CFC donated these autographed items to charities for them to auction or raffle off in conjunction with their fundraising efforts. And because the celebrities could now sit down and in a couple of hours sign several hundred items, they could support substantially more charities than they did before. Read more…