Friday, April 8, 2011
BC’s Dyroff Wins Hockey Humanitarian Award
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we should all get in line to emulate Brooks Dyroff. In doing so, not only would we do justice to Dyroff, we would also dramatically increase the number of underprivileged students in third-world countries who would be able to go on to college. Because that?s exactly what Dyroff plans to do.
The Boston College sophomore forward has been able to send over 40 Indonesian students to college over the last four years, the result of a not-for-profit organization called CEO 4 Teens, the brainchild of Dyroff and Kenny Haisfield, a childhood friend from Boulder, Colo.
For this and many other humanitarian deeds, Dyroff on Friday was named the 16th recipient of the BNY Mellon Wealth Management Hockey Humanitarian Award in a ceremony at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, site of the 2011 NCAA Men?s Frozen Four.
Since its inception in 1996, the Hockey Humanitarian Award has sought to recognize college hockey student-athletes, Division I or III, male or female, who give back to their communities in the true humanitarian spirit.
Dyroff most certainly is an exemplary model of what the Foundation seeks to honor.
In Boulder, when he wasn’t in the classroom or on the ice, Dyroff was always looking for someone to help. Along with Haisfield, Dyroff started working for community food banks, and made lunches for senior citizens and homeless shelters. “We loved it,” Dyroff reflects. “It was also a tipping point for us. We thought maybe we could put something together all by ourselves.”
Having returned from a family vacation in Indonesia, Haisfield shared with Dyroff all he had seen: struggling communities of close-knit families where deserving students were unable to go on to college to carve a better future for themselves due to lack of funds. After much introspection, CEO 4 Teens (Creating Educational Opportunities For Teens; www.ceo4teens.com) was born. Its immediate goal was straightforward: to award at least ten college scholarships every year to deserving Indonesian students who attended Campuhan College in Bali, Indonesia.
“At first, the figure was $600 in tuition per student for one year, but now it’s up to about $1,000, so our goal is to raise at least $10,000 a year to send ten students to college,” says Dyroff, who played for the AAA Colorado Thunderbirds and at Philips Andover Academy before arriving at Boston College. “But we don’t just ask for straight out donations; instead we’ve added a community service angle. We’ve asked for pledges in return for community service hours in Boulder.”