Rewarding students with a jump-start on life

IDENTIFYING ‘GOOD KIDS’: Norman Kelly, Metta Students Foundation founder, with Blanca Colato, left, and Justin Crespo, who received $1,000 grants from the nonprofit for engaging in an “act of kindness.” / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
IDENTIFYING ‘GOOD KIDS’: Norman Kelly, Metta Students Foundation founder, with Blanca Colato, left, and Justin Crespo, who received $1,000 grants from the nonprofit for engaging in an “act of kindness.” / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

When businessman Norman Kelly set up the Metta Students Foundation in 2012 to reward students for showing compassion to others, he didn’t expect the program would identify high-achievers.
Fast forward to December 2014, and the awarding of the 19th and 20th $1,000 grants, and Kelly has noticed just that: the winners, to date, tend to be high-achieving leaders, regardless of their background and circumstances.
“What I’ve noticed of the kids we’ve honored,” he said, “[is] every single one of them was going into a four-year school, and a lot of them are honor-roll students. So, you’ve got kids doing something loving and compassionate who are also doing the right thing with their grades and wanting to make something of their lives. Their unselfishness leads to the character of being successful in life.”
While Kelly didn’t set out to reward traits that specifically contribute to success in the workplace, he told Providence Business News that the quality of compassion students have shown seems to go hand in hand with at least the potential for that type of success.
“Selflessness, I think, leads to success in the workplace and inner self-respect,” he said. “It sets them up to be good people.”
Kelly is co-founder, partner and CEO at Software Quality Associates of Providence, an information technology consulting firm specializing in software quality testing and deployment since 1999.
“My company [has] been very lucky, very successful, so we were looking at starting a charitable arm of my business just to give back,” he recalled.
He and his partners decided to set aside up to $25,000 a year and reward “metta,” a word with origins in an ancient language indigenous to India that means loving kindness, among students, after Kelly learned accidentally about an instance of this type of good deed.
In October 2012, the foundation issued its first grants to Tayler Boardman-Kelly of North Providence and Stephen Carroll of Johnston after Boardman-Kelly learned that Carroll, who has cerebral palsy, wanted to go to his senior prom, and offered to be his date.
The foundation did not set out to connect the awards to the workplace, but simply wanted to support “random acts of kindness” that were being done without any thought of recognition, Kelly said.
This past October, Justin Crespo, 18, a senior at Hope High School in Providence, and his girlfriend, junior Blanca Colato, 17, won trophies as top male and female students completing an ROTC triathalon involving situps, pushups and pullups. In November and December, the foundation named them award winners for giving their trophies to special-needs students. About 40 kids participated in the triathalon, Crespo said. As he did so, he noticed that a freshman special-needs student wasn’t “down on himself” for not scoring higher, but instead “was smiling and kept pushing himself forward. I was cheering him on, and I watched him and thought, ‘Wow! This kid is really pushing himself. … This kid is a real ‘iron man’.”
Crespo posted a photo of the fellow student and trophy to Facebook, where his English teacher, Amanda Vetelino, saw it and nominated him for the grant.
Colato heard what Crespo was doing and made the same gesture toward a female special-needs student, she said. Colato also posted a photo to Facebook, said English teacher Amanda Vetelino.
“I’m planning to save the award for college,” said Colato. “There are many colleges I am looking into.”
The pair were not aware of the Metta awards but were happy to receive them, Crespo said.
“It made me realize that you can get rewarded for the simplest things,” he said. “I was proud of myself that I could get an award without realizing it, just by making someone else happy.”
Vetelino had nominated other students previously for Metta awards and said she was pleased to find two more deserving students at her school.
The students “may not think they did anything special but to someone else it mattered,” she said.
This past September, Jose Medina, 18, of Central Falls, won an award for giving life-saving CPR to a girl who went in water over her head in July and had become nonresponsive at Oakland Beach in Warwick. The young woman made a full recovery.
Now a freshman at Johnson & Wales University majoring in software engineering, Medina said he hopes to become a video game designer and start his own video game company.
“I was very happy and proud and surprised actually,” Medina said, when asked how the award made him feel.
Medina used his grant for “fun,” he said, declining to elaborate.
Although the foundation encourages students to use the grants for education, “it’s up to them,” Kelly said.
“These kids are on a very special path to be very successful in life,” said Kelly. “I don’t want to say they’ll be successful in the workplace. I don’t know where these kids are going to end up. But they’re going to be good kids doing what they want to do and achieving what they want to achieve.” •

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