With the regular season approaching, here is your recap of good work happening around the NFL:
With the Bengals headed to Buffalo to play against the Bills on Sunday, the Dalton family will be taking a detour to the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in conjunction with the Andy and Jordan Dalton Foundation to make a donation to the Buffalo Medical Center.
This donation comes in wake of last season, when the Bengals, lead by Dalton, clinched a win against the Dolphins to land the Bills in the playoffs as an AFC Wild Card qualifier. The Bengals win landed the Bills in the postseason for the first time in seventeen years, so naturally, the infamous table-breakers and condiment defilers comprising Bills Mafia made many of the donations to Dalton’s foundation in the form of $17.
Recently donned Gold Jacket member Brian Urlacher hosted his annual golf tournament, raising more than $10,000 for the Salvation Army on Thursday.
Capitalizing on the sensation surrounding the Cleveland Browns, the franchise’s collaboration with the local SPCA that began in 2015 has resulted in over one-hundred adoptions over the course of camp, including MVPuppies such as Barker Mayfield, Jabril Puppers, Tyruff Taylor and Myles Garuff.
The Seahawks Players Actions Fund, Frank Clark, and Seattle legends Pearl Jam teamed up to fight homelessness in the area through a charity concert and event series aiming to raise $10 million. Clark has a deeply personal connection to the cause, growing up homeless in Los Angeles.
Clark spoke of his personal experience at the start of Pearl Jam’s concert at Century Link, recounting a conversation he had with his mother as a six year old on Skid Row, saying that he “told her everything was going to be all right, because I felt like she was giving up. I feel like it was a time where she needed as much support as she could have, and as her son, her only child with her in those conditions, I felt like I was the person who should tell her that. I didn’t understand it at 6, didn’t know where I was going to be, I didn’t know I was going to be in the NFL, but at 6 years old, I told my mom everything was going to be all right, because I deeply felt we weren’t going to be in that situation our whole life.”
Clark was joined by Seahawks receiver Doug Baldwin, a champion of philanthropy in King county, in addition to the Seahawks Players Equality & Justice for All Action Fund. The Fund was created by players last year, led by Baldwin, with a mission to “support grassroots, ground-level organizations that are doing the work and having boots on the ground.” For Baldwin, creating the Fund arose out of himself and his peers acknowledging that they “were in a unique position to use our influence, to use our platform to spread the message and do things as athletes and really express the things that matter to us… As athletes, as players, as human beings, we’ve all experienced this at some level. That’s really what the action fund is all about, supporting these organizations that are viewing these social issues at a humanistic level, realizing that the people we’re interacting with are human beings, and they want to be loved and taken care of. That’s what we’re hoping to do now.”
Michael Strahan, former defensive end for the New York Giants and current TV personality for ABC, will be donating gear to MVP, a philanthropy that works to unite veterans and former professional athletes through fitness and support for one another. Strahan’s donation is part of a larger challenge to support the philanthropy originally founded by NFL Insider’s Jay Glazer. Strahan joins Nate Boyer, long snapper for the Seattle Seahawks and former Army Green Beret, as well as Chris Pratt and John Krasinski in raising awareness for MVP.
Before their second preseason game against the Bears, the Denver Broncos hosted the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Denver and guests of the NFL Play 60 program to watch warmups from the sideline and join the Denver Broncos cheerleaders on the field for player introductions. The Broncos hosted over 500 youth flag and tackle football participants at the game, and conducted a scrimmage prior to team warmups.
In the first days of August, the NFL Alumni (NFLA) announced it would be partnering with the National Football Cheerleaders Alumni Organization (NFCAO), a group comprised of over 14,000 former cheerleaders from around the League. This partnership aims to increase “membership, sponsorship and brand awareness for the NFCAO and overall benefit both organizations.”
One of NFCAO’s chief missions is to empower former cheerleaders to “connect, contribute to local and national charities.” For President and Co-Founder of the NFCAO, Terri Crane-Lamb, former Redskins cheerleader, the collaboration “will make a difference in our communities by continuing to support charities and NFL Alumni in need.”
