>> John Gilmore.
I'm a tight end for the New Orleans Saints, professional football player.
Just finished up my tenth season in NFL.
And I'm cofounder of the Gilmore Henne Community Fund, which is located in Reading, Pennsylvania.
We're set up to revitalize parks and recreational facilities in the area.
Really, the whole idea came about just driving around my hometown,
seeing some of the parks that I used to visit as a child.
Seeing that the condition they were in was pretty bad.
Drug paraphernalia, trash everywhere, pretty much abandoned,
totally different than what it was like when I was growing up.
So that kind of motivated me to kind of spearhead this whole effort and get it going,
and that was about three years ago.
Well, we're involved.
We're hands on.
I partnered with Chad Henne.
He's a Michigan graduate, unfortunately.
But we teamed up together, and we're hands on.
You know, it goes a long way when the community sees us out there helping out, lending a hand.
You know, we're not about just going in there and delivering a part.
We try to engage the community surrounding those parks and enable them
or empower them to fix their own.
So it's a pretty interesting way, and it's a great way to get that community
to take ownership of that park then.
We've had some success in the short amount of time because we are involved.
We do go door to door soliciting sponsorships.
We do show up at somebody's door and say, hey, can you help us build this park.
Can you help us do the demolition?
Can you help us do the excavating?
It's not somebody showing up and speaking for us.
So that goes a long way, and we built a lot of great relationships doing that.
So you talk about sustainability going forward, I think that's crucial.
I think that's key.
My busy days, believe it or not, are actually out of season.
You know, the in-season, again, I just finished up my tenth season.
So that's kind of become routine.
That's something that I know.
I wake up every day, 6:30 a.m., and I'm checking out at 5 p.m. And it might be one
or two phone calls concerning the fund.
Now off season's a little different.
You know, when we have our fundraising effort going on where we're gearing
up for our summertime projects, you know, my day can start at 8 a.m.
with a breakfast meeting with a potential sponsor.
Then it'll continue to go door to door with local businesses asking for their support.
Then I'll have maybe a neighborhood meeting later on that afternoon.
Sometime in between then, you know, I'm meeting with a landscaper, an excavator.
Everything happens pretty close together because Chad
and our schedules are pretty filled July through January.
You know, so when that February, March, April hits, you know, we got a short amount
of time to do a lot of things then.