Banking on pennies to fulfill a dream

6th January 2014   ·   0 Comments

By Kimberly Hopson
Contributing Writer

Twenty-four -year-old Ana Veal is building her own road to graduate school using a unique and inspirational fundraising effort that gives new purpose to the often-discarded penny.

Since graduating from Xavier University in 2011, Veal said she had been searching for a graduate program that would allow her to use her psychology degree, while indulging her natural interest in business design. The New Orleans native found exactly what she was looking for in Domus Academy, a private design school in Italy. She was accepted to her dream school in September.

Her jubilation was short-lived, however—Veal soon found that she would not receive enough financial aid to cover her monumental expenses. She would need to come up with a whopping $30,000 by Feb. 25, a steep sum in today’s economy. The young woman said she searched for scholarships to help fund her education, but with no luck.

“I was between a rock and a hard place, because I couldn’t get scholarships or loans. I had been working and saving money, but I did not have 20 euros,” she said, emphatically.

Veal chanced upon the story of Mike Hayes as she researched fundraising ideas in a last-ditch effort.

In 1987, Hayes raised $28,000 in under one month for his college tuition with the help of a little exposure from an article by a Chicago Tribune journalist. Veal found inspiration in Hayes’ amazing story, but said she wasn’t sure if she had the guts to take up an initiative of this magnitude.

Luckily, she found the push she needed while attending a Post Secret event at Tulane University in October.

“Frank Warren, the blog’s creator, talked about the power of secrets to unleash something that you’ve been holding inside of you, to free or liberate you from a painful past, or inspire you to go forward,” said Veal.

Warren left blank post cards for the attendees of the event to fill with their secrets and mail back to him. Veal was struck by his words, and wanted to participate in the project, but had no major secrets to share. However, her epiphany came while she was in the bathtub, she said.

“It just connected, what Mike had done in Chicago. I thought it’d be so cool if I could do that, but I was intimidated by it and really shy. So I thought, ‘Maybe that would be my secret—that I wanted to do this thing and replicate what this guy did, but I’m really shy.’”

Veal decided she would use this opportunity as a chance to break out of her shell. From there, she created a blog for the project and rented a post office box. Veal said she came home one day and noticed that the number of blog views had shot up to more than 4,000. It turned out that Warren had taken a picture of her post card secret and tweeted it, along with a link to her blog. Veal was surprised by and grateful for the support.

Soon afterward, she began to receive pennies and other loose change from all over the world. Many of the creatively-packaged letters contained encouraging notes and inspirational words. Some of the most touching were letters from a ninth-grade class at John McDonogh High School, she recalled. The students’ teacher had seen Veal on television and surmised that showing support would help teach her class an important lesson about the value of persistence.

Veal said her most recent count on Dec. 28 totaled 62,000 pennies, or $620. Though she has amassed a pretty large chunk of change, there is still a long way to go before she meets her goal.

Even faced with such a remote target, the young woman remains positive and refuses to back down. Veal said she plans to donate whatever she has collected should she not reach her objective in time. Like a true entrepreneur, she said she will also maintain the penny project.

“My intent was to use this project and turn it into a company. In the business design program, we have to design a company. So I’d like this to be my project and figure out a way to make it profitable to benefit other students,” she elaborated.

“I’m going to keep going. I just think there’s so much power in pennies. People just walk over these, but collectively, you can do so much with something that few people value.”

Readers can send their letters or donations to Veal at: Penny Drive, P.O. Box 1482, Gretna, LA, 70053. You may also donate via Paypal on Veal’s website, penniesforschool.­wordpress.com.

This article originally published in the January 6, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.