Nonprofit helps hundreds of children get college scholarships

Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Harvard, like a roll call of some of the most prestigious universities in America.

And all of them were earned — at least in part — in this very room, many of them by underprivileged students who came here battling mental health issues and left with scholarships to Ivy League and other prestigious schools.

Notre Dame. Georgetown. Stanford. Vanderbilt.

The list goes on.

It’s a Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of the Inspiring Children Foundation, a homey place filled with art, books and teenagers, tucked into a squat building near Lorenzi Park.

A series of whiteboards dominate an entire wall, covered in multi-colored lettering that spells out the nonprofit organization’s goals, values, schedule of events and more — a whole lot more.

“Our overall mission is transforming lives through a whole human approach to physical, social, mental and emotional health,” explains Trent Alenik, the foundation’s CEO, who’s also an alum of the program.

He stands beneath a header that reads “What We Do” with dozens of entries — project-driven learning, holistic health, community, life planning, mentoring, among them — over 40 in all.

Written in red marker, a long list of celebrity partners, ranging from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to fellow business magnate Sir Richard Branson to boxing Hall of Famer Mike Tyson to the late, great singer Tony Bennett.

Taking it all in alongside Alenik is Dr. Neal Mills, the former chief medical officer for Goldman Sachs, who retired early and relocated here from New York City to serve as the foundation’s chief connection officer.

“They’re essentially giving the youth the tools that they need to succeed and thrive throughout every dimension of their life. It’s really powerful,” explains Mills, who first learned of the organization after reading an article on Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jewel, a co-founder of Inspiring Children.

“There’s a lot of magic that’s happened this year,” he adds. “It’s been unbelievable.”

The numbers bear him out: abetted by some key additions to the staff, the past 12 months have been especially fruitful for the organization, whose budget doubled in 2024.

The foundation also secured its fourth transitional home this year, and with support from the Henderson Chamber of Commerce and Martin-Harris Construction, all were renovated.

Launched informally 25 years ago, with no staff and the aim of helping one child, the Inspiring Children Foundation has since blossomed into a multi-faceted organization offering an ever-growing range of programs and services, spanning education, mental health, housing assistance, nutrition and physical fitness, to name but a few.

In the past two decades, graduates of the organization’s Leadership Program have earned over $55 million in college scholarships.

“One-hundred percent of the children that came into our program five years ago or six years now had either significant anxiety or depression; over 50 percent had serious self-harm or suicide attempts,” notes Ryan Wolfington, president and founder of the nonprofit. “And yet five years later, when they graduated, 100 percent were in remission for anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation and 100 percent of them got scholarships to college. And of those scholarships, 58 percent were to tier-one, Ivy League-level schools.”

“These are kids that didn’t want to live,” he continues. “They were depressed. They all had significant financial hardships, family trauma. And yet, not only did they heal, but they fell in love with the growth process to the point where they’re performing at the highest levels. And that’s our system.”

‘A very unique program’

She tried to take her life.

Twice.

The second attempt left her in a coma for days.

Cherrial Odell’s childhood was a rough one: her father passed away from alcoholism when she was a teenager, her home life was less than stable.

Now she’s a junior at Stanford, majoring in psychology, an alum of the Inspiring Children Foundation.

She credits her time with the organization, which provided her and her mother a place to stay in one of their four transitional houses, with helping her find those first few pin-pricks of light amid so much darkness.

“I’ve been to mental health, like, psychiatric hospitals, and I never really left those places feeling like I had tools or support outside of that environment,” Odell says. “I feel like, what’s cool about the foundation is the tools that I’ve learned, the people that I’ve met. Those are lifelong, and sustain me within and outside of that environment.”

For Wolfington, who intervened directly in Odell’s case, a key to helping a victim of circumstance like her — or any number of children with similar challenges — is to avoid approaching them like victims at all.

“We don’t treat these kids like charity cases, like, ‘Oh, poor, suicidal kid,’ ” he says. “The people with anxiety and depression are usually the most intelligent, kind, empathetic, brilliant people in our society, and because nobody knows how to understand their challenges, they digress and fall apart. But given the right support, not only do they heal, but they become extraordinary.”

Wolfington knows this first-hand.

As a successful entrepreneur and president of a Vegas-based gaming company at relatively young age, he found himself struggling with anxiety and depression nonetheless.

“It’s like, ‘Wait, I’m working hard, I’m making good decisions. I’m successful. Why do I have these challenges?’ ” he recalls. “And when I started to look into ways to heal myself and to better myself, I realized that there’s so many incredible modalities and behavioral health therapies that help us not only heal, but grow at a very high rate and then perform at really high levels. I thought, ‘Why didn’t they teach me this at the private school I went to or the college I went to?’ ”

“So when we started the foundation,” he continues, “I thought, ‘I’m going to give young people what I wish I had been given when I was young.’ And even though I was given some of the best education, they didn’t give me a whole-human approach with social, emotional and mental health.”

A central component of the program is project-based learning, utilizing practical applications of a child’s interests as a kind of top-down approach to addressing mental and emotional wellness.

“You can’t really tell a kid, ‘Hey, let’s work on your mental health.’ They’re not going to be really that interested,” Wolfington says. “So we always created programs that tapped into each child’s passions. It’s like, ‘Hey, do you want to be an athlete? An entrepreneur? A writer?’

“You find their passions,” he adds, “and then you put them in real-life scenarios where they can practice their passion. When that happens, all of their emotions and insecurities and challenges come to the surface, and then we’re able to help them when they’re asking for help on their emotional and mental health.”

According to Odell, the foundation has had a lasting impact on her life.

“I take the principles and things I’ve learned there with me, like, wherever I go,” she says. “It’s definitely a very unique program.”

And to think, it all started with one kid.

Quiet start; loud results

In the late ’90s, Ryan Wolfington met tennis pro Marty Hennessy at the Stirling Club, where the former played and the latter coached.

Hennessy was working with a promising, yet wild teen at the time.

His name was Frideric Prandecki.

“I’m like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna help this kid,’ ” Wolfington recalls, teaming with Hennessy to informally plant the seeds for the foundation they’d eventually launch together. “I helped him, and then this other kid, and then it kind of grew.

“Before I knew it, it was an organization,” he continues. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna start this.’ It happened organically without even planning it. I mean, we were doing the work for four or five years before we became a nonprofit.”

The “other kid” that Wolfington speaks of was a then-14-year-old Alenik.

Back then, the idea was to use tennis — which remains a big part of the organization with tennis doubles stars Bob and Mike Bryan’s Team Bryan program — as a physical entry point to mental well-being.

“The early days weren’t necessarily about tennis,” Alenik explains. “It was about your soul and healing and growth and learning how to perform at a high level — all those principles and values that sport can teach. This was always about human development at the end of the day.”

It worked.

Prandecki earned a scholarship to NC State in 2006, became the captain of the tennis team, got a master’s degree from Harvard and founded his own business, Bob’s Repair in Henderson, one of the city’s leading HVAC companies.

Alenik headed off to college the next year.

He’d be back.

‘Some challenging years’

He remembers well the blue lips and anxiety attacks, the by-products of being a staff of one.

Trent Alenik was an early success story for the Inspiring Children Foundation, earning a scholarship to Villanova in 2007.

Back then, he thought he was going to be a finance guy on Wall Street.

“I did that in the summers,” he recalls, “and then I realized, like, ‘Wow, do I really want to live a life just crunching Excel all day?’ ”

And so Alenik returned to the foundation — this time in a professional capacity — upon graduating college.

“I knew for me that I got off track a little bit in college,” Alenik acknowledges, “and this would be the best place for me to get myself right and to build a really good foundation.”

It wouldn’t be easy: the organization’s annual budget was a slim $400,000 at the time.

Alenik was its sole employee.

“For me, personally, there was a lot of hard years where we were struggling financially, because we didn’t have a team to go out there and write the grants and we always just had enough to get by — and sometimes, like, barely enough,” he recalls. “As the only staff person and executing on everything, I was burning out all the time. It was some challenging years.”

This began to change in 2017, when the foundation had one of its first major breakthroughs, earning a three-year financial commitment from the Sands Cares Accelerator program, with Sands Chairman and CEO Rob Goldstein an early booster of the foundation.

As a result of the support from Sands, the foundation was able to host the first of its Inspire Galas in 2017, featuring Jewel, who’s become one of the engines of the organization and a co-chair of its advisory board.

“That was the biggest fundraiser that we had ever had,” Alenik says. “That was the catapult to us really taking off.”

Another catapult?

That time the whole world shut down.

A game-changing challenge

Ryan Wolfington remembers when he couldn’t even use the words “mental health” when describing what his foundation was all about.

“We would say, ‘youth development;’ we would say, ‘healing trauma,’” he recalls of the stigma that once shrouded the subject. “The big change was COVID.”

For the Inspiring Children Foundation, there was a silver lining to the dark cloud that was the pandemic.

“When COVID shut the world down, a lot of people had to deal with their own mental health, whether they wanted to or not, because there weren’t the escapes that there were prior, whether that be travel or hospitality and things like that,” Alenik says. “That woke a lot of people up, and then that started putting us on the map.”

A major driver behind the group’s growth was the foundation’s enormously successful #NotAloneChallenge.

Launched by Jewel in November 2022, it became the largest mental health movement in history, offering free digital mental health tools and earning over 3.2 billion social media impressions with the support of hundreds of executives, celebrities, athletes and mental health experts.

The #NotAloneChallenge had wide-ranging ramifications for the foundation, including catching the attention of Dr. George Rapier, a prominent figure in the healthcare industry as chairman and CEO of WellMed Medical Management Inc.

This year, he became the single biggest donor to the organization — the foundation’s home base is named the Blake Rapier Wellness Center in honor of his late son.

Rapier’s support helped significantly boost the organization’s budget for 2024, paving the way for some important new hires, including development manager Eleanor Chapman, a native of England who came to the U.S. to play tennis as a teenager and who earned her MBA from Indiana’s Valparaiso University last December.

“I knew that I wanted to do something where I was helping people and making a difference,” she says of coming to the foundation. “I didn’t want just the monotony of sitting in an office doing work that isn’t that impactful.”

“Everyone is living a lifestyle to try and be better, not just professionally, but in their personal lives, and we’re all adopting those principles,” she continues. “It’s not just like fluff that we talk about in these events. I think people can see how authentic we are and that comes across in the events. We very much live the brand.”

Chapman’s impact has been pronounced — among her contributions to the organization is helping to produce a highly successful philanthropic dinner series with donors, celebrities and notable figures in the mental health and wellness space.

She also serves as a house parent for one of the organization’s transitional homes.

“We’ve been very lean and mean and understaffed, underfunded for so many years,” Alenik says, “to be able to have someone like Eleanor come in, who buys into the mission, who understands what we do and can bring a skill set to the table that’s much needed on the administrative and development side of the operation , has been an absolute godsend.

“Without her support this year, and without her stepping up in the way that she has with every event, with day-to-day programming, I really don’t know we’d be looking back on such a big year,” he adds. “It’s been an absolute game-changer.”

A plug-and-play mental health curriculum

Back at the foundation’s home base, Alenik is detailing some of the organization’s goals moving forward.

Chief among them: spreading the program, making it shareable.

“The curriculum is something that we feel can have the biggest impact,” he says. “We don’t have the bandwidth or the finances to go and open up shop in several cities. But we can go and say, ‘Here’s the playbook,’ sort of like the franchise model.”

Wolfington calls them “happy meals,” a plug-and-play mental health curriculum that can be given to other schools and nonprofits.

“I look at all the schools in Nevada, even the private schools, and it’s like they have so many good things,” he says. “They have so many things that are better than ours — they have a campus, budgets, teachers — how do we give them what we learn in our lab, so that they can add the emotional and mental and project-based stuff, so that they can really make their existing infrastructure even more effective?”

“Right now, we’re applying for a lot of grants,” he continues. “So we can take our curriculum and put it into a box and give it to other schools and other charities and other organizations, so they can take our best practices and tools and apply them very simply.”

What do these practices all boil down to?

Learning by doing.

Even when it comes to running a foundation.

“Our website was created by the children,” Wolfington says. “The social media is run by the children. A lot of the curriculum is co-created with the children. At all of our events, the children help. I always tell my staff, ‘It’s four times longer to have the children do it, because they make mistakes.’ But you’re building a skill set, a confidence, and mental well-being through this process.

“There is an art to living, there is a psychology to it, there is a math to it, and you can build it out,” he continues. “We’ve been a 25-year lab on, ‘How do you create the best youth development and family development program possible?’ And we’re not finished.”

To apply for a scholarship to the Inspiring Children Foundation, visit their website inspiringchildren.org.

If you are thinking about suicide, or are worried about a loved one or friend, help is available 24/7 by calling or texting the Lifeline network at 988. Live chat is available at 988lifeline.org.

The Review-Journal is owned by the Adelson family, including Dr. Miriam Adelson, majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands Corp., and Las Vegas Sands President and COO Patrick Dumont.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.