Secret Talents
His name alone gets enough attention. Kirby DarDar: Former NFL running back for the Miami Dolphins. The Kirby DarDar KIDS WIN! Football Camp. DarDar, board member of organizations such as Syracuse University Athletics and Catholic Charities.
Kirby and I first met when I stepped into his cubicle at HSBC to discuss my first business account. I got as far as telling him that I researched grants as part of my business when our conversation and relationship took a friendlier direction.
DarDar was a good artist when he was young who never got the opportunity to develop his own abilities. He told me that he was too busy being a star athlete in his track and football days at SU. Those took him on to play pro football in Florida.
But he loved art and part of my business was art representation. A.B. Resource was my business name, and the idea was an arts agency / event planning company that had room to grow into a production company. I not only wanted to represent artists for gallery sales, but also provide them with grants opportunities and teach them how to persue that kind of funding.
And DarDar was looking for a grant writer. We got our things together and moved our meeting to an empty floor of unused administrative HSBC space. Our new meeting lasted over an hour.
Kirby not only had a love for football and kids, but of the opportunities provided through grants that NFL youth football camps could bring to the Syracuse locals. He showed me his business plan before I even got to mine.
He was linked to Catholic Charities and made a name for himself that way too, in tv and print. What he saw between he and I was such an obvious opportunity that I could not help to begin spinning my own wheels about it.
I remember telling him that I would help him with our first grant project for free, as a friend. After that, he reeled me in with a 20% cut of all grants I would ever write thereafter. It was too good to be true. Any grant worth writing would bring in two hundred easily. Three grants a week would not be a bad income for a single guy in Syracuse.
Later I found out that none of it would be legal. But I liked hearing this guy talk to me about money in a private floor of the bank he represented. I also liked the ideas he was developing. All of this coming from the former pro player who was now sustaining his family as head of all Syracuse business accounts.
He told me that he developed the downtown courthouse himself; which was also a grants project. The courthouse was unique because it enforced community service instead of fines. It used the idea of rehabilitation over punishment.
The man had a great public conscious. Many months passed before we worked on something solid, but I always remember that spontaneous meeting and the personal things that we so easily trusted each other with.
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