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First Posted: 3/27/2014 You don&#8217;t know Ray Whitney but he has faith in you.
Ray is a student at Luzerne County Community College. He&#8217;s what is known as a non-traditional student. That means he wasn&#8217;t a high school senior a year ago &#8230; or, in Ray&#8217;s case, even ten years ago.
Way back, the college&#8217;s slogan was: &#8220;A great place to start, or start over.&#8221; Ray would fall in the &#8220;start over&#8221; category.
Ray doesn&#8217;t know it yet, but as he nears graduation, he&#8217;s going to hear my &#8220;wish I had a magic wand&#8221; speech. I don&#8217;t deliver it to every graduate, just the special ones. It goes something like this: &#8220;I love everything about teaching at the community college except for one thing: they don&#8217;t give me a magic wand. A magic wand that I could wave and, just like that, put our top students into jobs.&#8221;
Some, maybe half, of the students I teach plan to continue their education at a four-year school. But the others hope to use their associate&#8217;s degree to gain employment. And no one has to tell you &#8212; or them &#8212; the chances of that happening today.
It wasn&#8217;t always like this. As recently as 12 to 15 years ago, a magic wand wasn&#8217;t necessary because I often could help a good student land a job. Many times, in fact, the job came looking for them.
It was not unusual for the director of a composing room at a newspaper to call to say there was an opening for a student with strong graphic design skills. I used to love when that happened mainly because the student I sent was guaranteed to be hired.
When I&#8217;d invite said student into my office for the good news, I always said the same thing: I am not recommending you for this job because you know Photoshop inside out, although you do. And not because you know QuarkXpress, the preferred design software of the time, or MultiAd Creator, an advertising design program. &#8220;I am recommending you,&#8221; I&#8217;d say, &#8220;because you are not a jerk.&#8221; I made it clear it was their depth of character, their sincerity, their good heart, their team-playerness that won them my seal of approval.
&#8220;You see,&#8221; I&#8217;d say, &#8220;you&#8217;re going to walk into that place with Ed Ackerman tattooed on your forehead, so you have to be a first class human being.&#8221; Not a single one of them ever let me down.
Those were the days.
Such calls don&#8217;t come any more. The best I can do is fight to get a really sharp student an internship and hope that escalates into a part-time job.
Then there&#8217;s Ray Whitney. He may not need my magic wand speech at all.
&#8220;Ever hear of crowd sourcing?&#8221; he asked me one day. I had, I told him, but what did it have to do with him.
Crowd sourcing is an on-line way to solicit funds. Non-profits do it all the time. Simply put, the concept is that if you needed to raise a million dollars you could try finding a hundred people to give you $100,000 each. Good luck with that. On the other hand, if through the internet you could reach a million people and get a dollar from each &#8230; voila, goal achieved.
Well, Ray&#8217;s wondering &#8212; actually, he&#8217;s convinced &#8212; that a lot of people out there would hand a couple of bucks not to a cause but to a young guy starting out. And they&#8217;d do it, he says, not for a tax write off, but simply for the good feeling that comes with doing good.
Ray&#8217;s ultimate goal is to make movies. And I, for one, think he has the talent to do so.
But Ray&#8217;s a realist. He&#8217;s been on his own since he was 16 and bounced from foster home to foster home for most of his life prior to that. &#8220;I lost my mom, my dad and my sister when I was an infant, but I have no idea how or why and I guess I never will,&#8221; he says.
Ray&#8217;s lived in New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona and various parts of Pennsylvania. He&#8217;s worked a lot of jobs, from washing dishes to making bricks, and has become somewhat of a whiz in information technology. He&#8217;s formed an IT company he calls bitstrength.com and if all goes according to plan, he&#8217;s hoping to earn and save enough money to go to California and get into film school.
What Ray needs to fuel all of this is capital. And that&#8217;s where crowd sourcing comes in. He&#8217;s opened an account at indiegogo.com where people can go to support his dream. Ray really believes total strangers will log on (type in indiegogo.com and search bitstrength as one word) and donate $2 or $5 or maybe even ten or twenty. His goal is to raise $20,000.
Why does he believe people will do this?
&#8220;Because I do,&#8221; he says. &#8220;I also pray a lot.&#8221;
Ray asked if I would help him get started by telling Dispatch readers about him, which, if you are paying attention, I just did.
Why knows? Maybe this is the magic wand I&#8217;ve been wishing for.

A young man’s ‘capital idea’ touched my heart