Super Bowl champs help out student-run charity

Very few not-for-profit charities are started and run by high school students.

Fewer still can draw on members of the legendary 1985 Chicago Bears to headline their first major fundraiser.

But both are true of the Create A Change Foundation, founded last October by South Barrington's Kathleen Cohen, who'll be a senior at Barrington High School this fall.

Last Friday, the fledgling group drew 50 people for bowling and bocce at Pinstripes at The Arboretum of South Barrington, where seven Bears alumni helped raise $1,600.

Mike Singletary, Al Harris, Emery Moorehead, Tom Thayer, Wendell Davis, Calvin Thomas and Shaun Gayle spent the evening signing autographs, chatting with fans and bowling one-on-one with those who'd bid for the opportunity.

The event was arranged by Harris, a fellow South Barrington resident whose daughter Emily is also a Barrington High senior on the foundation's board of directors with Cohen.

Though the evening was deemed a success given the foundation's small publicity budget, members hope a similar event next year will draw many more people and dollars, said Therese DeSerto, Cohen's mother and the only adult director of the foundation.

It was DeSerto's lifelong example of volunteerism and personal struggle with multiple sclerosis that inspired her oldest child to look beyond herself.

"I think she sees how desperate the need is to find hope and find solutions," DeSerto said.

Cohen said she's "been volunteering since I was little, and medical issues are very important to me."

But the main thing that inspired her to start her own charity was her disappointment by how much most others spend on overhead costs.

By contrast, she wants her own group to be run entirely by volunteers; donate directly to those providing help or research, rather than to other not-for-profits; and change the focus of its aid every year.

The foundation's long-term medical issue of 2009 is juvenile diabetes, and its short-term issue is the funding of corrective cleft palate surgeries for children.

Though she plans to graduate a semester early this winter, Cohen also wants the foundation to remain associated with volunteerism of high school students.

When she's out of college in a few years, she'll be able to take over the financial and legal oversight her mother now provides. But she wants generations of high school students to come to be the heart and soul of the Create A Change Foundation.