Feature
Legacy of Hope
- heather anne lee
- Fred Lopez
By all appearances, David Terry should be tired. He has a full-time career, runs a nonprofit, and spends his evenings chasing grants, building partnerships, and dreaming up new ways to help teenagers navigate an increasingly complicated world. His calendar resembles a game of Tetris played by someone with a caffeine addiction.
Sit down with him for five minutes, though, and exhaustion doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.
“What I’m seeing in all the kids I’ve met over the last seven years is they’re losing hope,” says David, founder and president of Legacy Events for Education. “My goal is to give that back to them — to restore their belief in the future.”
Consider the world today’s teenagers are inheriting: student debt, housing costs, inflation, political division, economic uncertainty. A relentless scroll of reasons to give up before they’ve started. “It’s all they hear, on TV, on social media, that everything is getting more expensive,” David says. “They can’t afford this. They can’t afford that. They’re never going to buy a house. Everything just seems negative.”
For David, that’s exactly where the work begins. The son of two teachers from upstate New York, he grew up watching service modeled rather than preached. “Everybody in the community always knew they could depend on my parents,” he says. As a teenager, he volunteered, participated in peer counseling programs, and developed a habit of standing up for people who couldn’t stand up for themselves — including the time he punched a sixth-grade bully in the nose for picking on a younger kid on the school bus. He laughs about it now. The week-long suspension probably felt less funny at the time.
“My life has always been about sticking up for the little guy,” he says.
Years later, after becoming involved with fundraising efforts at local schools, he began noticing another group that needed advocates: students trying to find their place in the world.
Legacy Events for Education emerged from that realization.
What began as a scholarship-focused nonprofit has evolved into something much broader. Today, the organization teaches financial literacy, offers resume-writing and interview skills workshops, helps families navigate college admissions, and creates opportunities for students to explore careers they may never have considered. Over the last seven years, those programs have served nearly 400 local families.
This year, Legacy awarded $21,000 through 28 scholarships recognizing leadership, volunteerism, and community involvement.
“Showing that you care is the most important thing you can do for other people. That’s why I love this program. It rewards the kids who are already showing the world they care...”
David is especially proud of the teacher-nominated scholarships. “My favorite joke is that I get to give teachers homework,” he laughs.
Teachers submit essays nominating students whose stories often include extraordinary perseverance, quiet acts of kindness, and personal challenges overcome.
“Showing that you care is the most important thing you can do for other people,” he says. “That’s why I love this program. It rewards the kids who are already showing the world they care.”
He’s equally insistent, though, that caring about students means refusing to funnel them all toward the same destination. “College can be a wonderful path for some,” David says, “but it isn’t the only one.”
To illustrate the point, he shares the story of a young man who dreamed of becoming a nurse but couldn’t afford nursing school. Rather than putting that dream on hold, he entered an electrician apprenticeship, earning a paycheck while learning a skilled trade. Today he has a stable career, financial independence, and the means to pursue nursing whenever he’s ready. To David, that’s not a detour; it’s a success story.
“He now has options,” David says. “We’re just trying to show these kids how to be open to new ideas and opportunities.”
That philosophy is driving several new initiatives, including online educational programs and expanded career exploration opportunities that connect students with professionals in healthcare, hospitality, construction, and the skilled trades.
That belief is driving Legacy’s most ambitious project yet. David openly describes himself as “a student of ADHD,” and after years of watching bright kids get left behind in traditional classrooms, he’s determined to build something different — the Legacy Life Skills Academy, designed to reach students who learn in ways most schools aren’t built to accommodate.
“There are so many kids being left behind because they’re just not being reached the right way,” he says. “We tend to think of education as something that happens inside school buildings — a teacher, a classroom, a report card. But communities educate children too. The Academy will do both.”
He pauses, then says the thing that seems to drive everything else: “Young people deserve adults who believe in them before they’ve figured out how to believe in themselves. If we can give these kids hope, we can change the world.”
