Selfless for Scott honors North Shore man's hope to put others before himself
Scott Boorstein was one of those rare individuals who thought of others before himself.
Instead of asking for birthday or Christmas gifts he'd request that donations be made to charity.
He'd strike up conversations with homeless people. To Scott they weren't marginal. They mattered.
“Scott just had the best of intentions, always. He wanted everybody to feel like a somebody,” said his younger sister, Ali Boorstein.
When he took his own life in 2016, at age 21, it left a hole in his family, among his many friends in his hometown of Deerfield, and among his Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity brothers at Northwestern University.
To honor his memory and altruism, those closest to him created “Selfless for Scott,” an annual charity event on and around his Feb. 6 birthday.
“Our ultimate hope is to encourage people to live the motto, Keep spreading kindness one selfless act at a time,” Ali Boorstein said over the phone from her home in Philadelphia.
The 2021 project reflects on Ali Boorstein's own past work with Project Linus, which donates blankets to children in hospitals, shelters and social service agencies.
She purchased and distributed 2,200 fabric squares for the hundreds of people in her network, and their people, to decorate with colors, sayings or whatever positive messages and images floated their boat. On Feb. 6 the Selfless for Scott squad returned the squares to parents Marc and Nina Boorsteins' home in Riverwoods. Project Linus volunteers will sew them into 138 blankets for children.
Ali thought she'd need only 500 squares. With teachers picking up 50 at a time, things like that, she kept going back to the store for more.
Northbrook's Beth Gilford, friends with Nina Boorstein since they were 8-year-old girls growing up in Lincolnwood, designed four squares herself and gave 30 others to her own mother to distribute. Gilford has participated in all five of these events since Scott Boorstein's fraternity brothers debuted Selfless for Scott in 2017.
“He embodied everything that you would hope your child would be, and embodied everything that you hope your child's friends would be. He had the most giving soul, heart and spirit,” said Gilford, who we wrote of on Dec. 3 regarding her COVID-19 accessory item, mask & move.
Last year's event aided the Anthony Rizzo Family Foundation by distributing 200 gift bags to cancer-stricken children at Lurie Children's Hospital plus another 100 “emergency bags” for parents. Another year the project was to paint a mural in a Metra underpass in Woodlawn on Chicago's South Side.
Selfless for Scott has partnered with New Life for Old Bags, a volunteer organization run from a Chicago church that turns recycled plastic bags into sleeping mats for homeless people. In 2017, more than 200 people gathered at Scott's AEPi house and packed 400 meals for The Night Ministry and the Inspiration Corporation charities in Chicago.
“The idea is for him to live on through everybody doing one selfless act at a time,” Gilford said.
This year's campaign started Jan. 12 — 26 days before Scott's Feb. 6 birthday, a day for every year. Over that time the 362 followers of the Selflessforscott Facebook page were challenged to do one random act of kindness a day. (The Instagram account, @selflessforscott, has 409 followers.) They'd then post photos or messages of their acts on the sites.
It could range from simply complimenting a person to shoveling snow, donating books, writing a positive online review for a business ... possibilities are endless.
“It's harder this year because we can't be in person anywhere,” Ali Boorstein said, “but we've found that these simple acts of kindness are just as nice and we don't want people to be spending money.”
They spill over into the rest of the year.
“Some of us cooked a meal at the Ronald McDonald House,” Gilford said. She added that Ali Boorstein and Selfless for Scott also sell note cards featuring drawings by Scott when he was young, to benefit Experience Camps for children who've suffered the loss of a parent, sibling or caregiver.
Typically on Feb. 6 a couple hundred people would converge to assemble gift bags, pack food, paint the underpass and otherwise finalize that year's project. Given the conditions, this year people will drive to the Boorstein's house in Riverwoods to drop off their decorated fabric squares.
In an email, Ali Boorstein wrote that as her parents have carried their grief at Scott's passing “as an enduring testament” to his memory, they insure his immortality.
“This kindness being spread in his memory, I think would really make him so happy,” she said. “I always said he was going to change the world. He was so humble and would never, ever say anything like that. With his loss we got to see just how many people he touched.”