Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer
For this year’s Good Men, business has a heart. Whether they are running a baseball team, baking bread, or helping athletes raise funds for overlooked causes, they have found their passions in creating sound business enterprises that focus first on building community.
Scott Shirley
Co-Founder and Executive Director, Uplifting Athletes | Harrisburg
In a photo array telling the story of athletes working for social good, there’s a picture of seven-year-old Jack Hoffman in a University of Nebraska football uniform, crossing the goal line to score for the Huskers. Scott Shirley remembers that Jack’s dad, Andy, wondered how a modest family could make a dent in the fight against Jack’s rare brain tumor.
Shirley reminded him that his own dad died from a rare disease only one month before a new treatment emerged. “As long as Jack’s still here,” he told Andy, “you need to run as fast as you can.”
“And he really took it to heart,” Shirley says now. “We helped the family set up a foundation. They’ve done incredible things.”
Over an athletic career playing football and baseball at East Pennsboro School District and football at Penn State, Shirley contemplated leveraging the spotlight on athletes for social good. His father, legendary Mechanicsburg High School baseball coach and English teacher Don Shirley, was the spark. He was “a great father and husband, a great teacher and coach, a man of faith.”
Then, Don Shirley’s death from kidney cancer in 2005 opened Scott Shirley’s eyes to the plight of families encountering rare diseases — seven thousand conditions affecting fewer than two hundred thousand people each year — who, in Shirley’s words, are “orphaned by the system.” While playing football at Penn State, Shirley founded Lift for Life, the team’s weightlifting competition to raise money for kidney cancer research.
From there, Uplifting Athletes was born (www.upliftingathletes.org). Student-led chapters in twenty-one college football programs leverage their prestige to educate, fundraise, and advocate for a chosen cause. The “uplifting” in the organization’s name reflects “that idea of inspiring people with hope. These are athletes who are lifting up others, lifting spirits,” Shirley says.
Shirley didn’t go directly into Uplifting Athletes from college. He was an engineer, “working my dream job with Clark Construction,” he says. He was running a $140 million project in Washington, D.C., when he decided to leave, not quite knowing where it would take him.
When he met his wife, Stephanie, Shirley found a partner who shared his passion for social good. She founded Bennis Public Relations to “help clients build careers at the intersection of purpose and profit.” He shares a favorite quote from Aristotle: “Where your talents meet the needs of the world, therein lies your crossing.”
Alongside the nonprofit Uplifting Athletes, Shirley helped launch the for-profit Pldgit software, which athletes and teams use for fundraising. Whether it’s used by amateurs or professionals, including the Cincinnati Bengals’ Devon Still and his “Sack Pediatric Cancer” campaign while his four-year-old daughter underwent treatment for neuroblastoma, the software means that “anything you can measure, you can collect pledges for,” says Shirley. “It’s fantasy sports meets charitable giving.”
Shirley knows that every college football team has “a handful of good kids and a handful of knuckleheads. Which group has more influence on everybody in between determines the character of the team.” Uplifting Athletes empowers the good kids “to be that positive influence.” Its March 21 Gridiron Gala (www.upliftingathletes.org/gridirongala) is a gourmet tailgate party meant to raise awareness of Uplifting Athletes and its multi-faceted impact of building leadership skills among young athletes and raising funds to fight rare diseases.
His dad, Shirley knows, “is enjoying this journey with me.”
He adds,“My wife and I always say when you don’t plan everything, everything goes as planned.”
Charlie Crystle & Craig Lauer
CEO & Chief Product Officer, The Lancaster Food Co.
Old friends Charlie Crystle and Craig Lauer were walking their dogs when the threads of a running conversation wove into an idea: a locally sourced, organic food company that would pay thriving wages.
“It was a combined passion for food and supporting local agriculture and having a positive impact on the local economy,” says Lauer. “All of these different skills and passions came together.”
From that conversation in late 2013, Crystle and Lauer founded The Lancaster Food Co., a producer of breads, spreads, and other products to come. The launch was meteoric, rising in mere months from the seed of an idea to a food producer with twenty vendors from metro Washington, D.C., to metro New York City. Some big names come up in the conversation about sellers or hoped-for sellers of their goods – Giant Food Stores, Wegmans, Whole Foods Market.
“Big isn’t necessarily bad,” says Crystle. “We’re trying to become big.”
The Lancaster Food Co. (www.thelancasterfoodcompany.com) was founded to make things happen. The name conjures Lancaster’s Old World values and reputation for wholesomeness, says Lauer. The mission includes a commitment to hiring people living in poverty or near-poverty and paying them enough to support their families and even build savings.
It’s “just not right” when workers paid a supposed living wage are “just scraping by,” says Crystle. “They should be able to pay their bills without working multiple jobs. They should be able to feed their families without government assistance.”
If others follow their example, he says, “it’s better for the community. You deal with that first, and you’re going to strengthen the community, ultimately.”
The partnership draws on the strengths of each. Lauer and Crystle grew up together in Lancaster, went their separate ways, and came home. Crystle is an entrepreneur whose ventures include founding ChiliSoft, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and co-founding GiftWorks. Lauer spent twenty years in New York City consulting on brand development for major companies. He’s the one who is passionate about food and cooking. Crystle credits Lauer with developing “some amazing stuff” that sells because it’s just so good.
“I had never heard of roasted sunflower spread, and now I eat it all the time,” he says. “It’s really good.”
Lauer says they “care very much about demand and meeting people where they want to be met. But if we can’t make it great, we’re not going to make it. We have very, very high standards.”
That said, he adds, “there aren’t too many things we can’t make great.”
Lauer admits that a “naïve energy” has propelled their rapid growth, but “we just like trying to be nimble and trying to bring things to market in a seasonal way.” Crystle says they’re “serious about the mission, but it’s fun, too. We’re learning all the time.”
Social impact companies don’t just plow profits into charity but also operate on sound business principles that make them competitive and that uplift everyone they deal with, says Crystle. The driving force is creating something “that is really fulfilling and makes it easy to get up and go to work every day.” Lauer concurs.
“If we can serve as any kind of model or – this might sound a little highfalutin’ – but as some kind of an inspiration to others who are thinking of building a business, [are] currently building one or have built one, then that’s a win.”
Eric Menzer
President, The York Revolution
Ask Eric Menzer if he has any baseball experience.
“As a scorekeeper,” he answers. Seems his hand-eye coordination is wanting. But as a game changer in the York economic scene, you could say that Menzer has hit it out of the park.
Menzer brings a diverse portfolio to the York Revolution, York’s Atlantic League baseball team (www.yorkrevolution.com). He came to York in 1987 to head the former York Area Transit Authority and then was hired as economic development director under Mayor Charlie Robertson. As senior vice president for Wagman Construction, he helped develop the Codo lofts and other projects now considered cornerstones of York’s revitalization.
All those paths led to baseball. Robertson first broached his idea for a minor-league team with his economic development director, and Menzer bought into the idea. “Either I was nutty, too, or he had a lot more vision than I had,” he says now. Then, with Wagman, Menzer oversaw construction of Santander Stadium, the 6,200-seat home of the Revolution.
“This is the perfect business because it combines the fun and the rewards and the anxiety of a for-profit business with a very strong engagement with the community,” says Menzer. “It’s not like we’re moving. It’s not like we can go somewhere else to get customers. We will live or die on the strength of our relationships in this community.”
The Maryland native recognized right away that York has “an extraordinary level of community engagement.” He has tapped into that spirit, admitting that he likes being in charge and can be demanding, but also saying “[I] won’t ask people to do something I won’t do myself.”
“If you are genuinely committed to putting a great product out to the public, whether that’s a public transit system, real estate development, a city government, or a baseball team, and if you’re willing to work as hard to make that happen as you expect anyone else to work, I think people at the end of the day respond to that.”
Menzer came to truly understand the community’s capacity to care and to coalesce for a cause when his fourteen-year-old son Reid died after being hit by a car while riding a homemade street luge. Reid was passionate about everything he did, and his friends forged a broad-based coalition to make his dream come true: construction of the Reid Menzer Memorial Skatepark.
“It’s about people doing what they love doing, enjoying doing it, and doing it together,” he says.
The skatepark, baseball stadium, and revitalization causes for which Menzer serves – he’s on the board of Main Street York, the Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center, and the York Community Foundation’s YorkCounts – all have something in common. Menzer believes passionately in community places where people from all income levels and walks of life can mingle. York, he says, is “socially, racially, ethnically, economically diverse. If we can build a community that views those things as strengths, because I think they are strengths, that’s the kind of place I want to live.”
Menzer does his job for the love of baseball, but also for “helping people have a great time in their community, together with their family and friends, raising money for nonprofits, watching the smile on little kids’ faces when they get to throw out the first pitch on their birthdays.” That is the foundation for running a business, he says.
“One of the sayings around here is, ‘We make best day evers.’ If you make a kid say, ‘Mom, Dad, that was the best day ever,’ then everything else falls into place.”
