Talk About Cutting Forward – Making Headlines!

HEADLINES

   THE PROVINCE NEWSPAPER . . . SUNDAY, AUGUST 16/2009

A  CLASS ACT

“Former street kid offers $1 million in scholarships to 10 students to live and learn in B.C. Find out how you can be one of them.”  

Dean Duperron was 18 and living on the streets of Vancouver’s downtown inner city.  He had just  enough money in his pocket to buy five one-cent candies – his sole sustenance for the next five days.  A man standing in front of him brandished a five dollar bill under his nose.  Duperron saw the fiver as a fortune.  He could have grabbed it and ran.

 “In that moment you get a chance to see who you are,’ says Duperron.  ‘At that point, there was no chance I was going to be able to eat for the rest of the week.”

But despite overwhelming hunger, the Alberta-born homeless young man says old fashioned values kept him from acting on his impulse to grab the money and run.

It would have been easy to steal, he says, and it would have been easy to beg for money. He did neither that day, nor any other day for the next six to eight months

on the streets after his father kicked him out of the family home. Cold nights, food eaten from a dumpster, and the occasional luck of the finding of a quarter on the pavement were the things that got him thinking.  

 Those dark times spawned in him a desire to be educated.  The desire pushed him to get a job….first as a janitor at McDonalds, then as an assistant manager at the local K Mart, followed by a brief reconciliation with his father.  In that time he moved back into the family home and persued an under-graduate degree at the University of B.C.  During his third year he took a job as a computer instructor at Mackay’s Business School.  A few years later he found himself at Control Data Corporation; an American super computer firm.

“I realized people’s lives are shaped by who they are and what they do rather than what they have done,” says Duperron, now 53. ” If you have an education you can choose what you want to do, rather than life choosing for you”.

Duperron and his wife were eventually able to buy 95 percent of the then fledgling Sprott-Shaw Community College.  He transformed the College into a profitable operation with 22 campuses ( 20 in B.C. and 2 in Alberta) 250 employees and an estimated $50 million in annual revenue.

Word of the contest has already made its way around the globe through Internet chat sites and word of mouth. The contest begins Thursday, August 20^th.

The 10 winners will be announced December 1^st. 

“Education changed my life”, says Duperron; ‘if this works we will be able to say we have helped people to succeed world-wide”.

“Any one living in poverty or with extreme challenges has a door open to them, to not only change their own life but to change an entire community”.

What a story!

And it could be yours . . . if you’re bored and unhappy with circumstances, you must first get out of your chair; stand up; cut forward; make a decision to walk away from where you are and go in a new direction.  Make things right with those who have offended you; go back to school or college.  It’s your decision and no one else’s. God helps people who are willing to step out and go where they have never gone before!