At 14, High-School Freshman Already Is a Seasoned Fund Raiser

At 14, Michael Munds has already been instrumental in raising more than $150,000 for 10 causes,

including a Denver children’s hospital, and a library for a homeless shelter. Michael doggedly canvasses households and visits businesses to get contributions. He gets companies to donate goods or sponsor fund-raising efforts, and he talks kids and adults into giving their time to his causes.

Michael approaches his charity work with a mixture of chutzpah and compassion that has proven highly effective. When he was trying to persuade students at his middle school to help him raise money for a girl who had been severely burned in an accident, his classmates weren’t very interested at first. After all, she didn’t go to their school. “Fine,” he told the other students. “But if it was you, would you hope that people who don’t know you would care?” After his speech, students pitched in to help, raising $20,000 through a series of fund-raising events.

Michael, who chooses the causes he wishes to support without help from his parents or others, is drawn to fund-raising efforts that help children who have been injured or disabled, perhaps in part because he was born with Treacher Collins Syndrome, which causes facial deformities. In addition to the burn victim, he has helped a baby with a rare spinal disorder, as well as children harmed by the war in Kosovo and the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. “Sometimes I raise money after seeing a news story,” he says. “I just follow my heart.”

Michael has become so well known as a fund raiser in the metropolitan Denver area that he is sometimes approached by charities seeking help. For example, the American Diabetes Association asked him to organize a bowlathon in the spring.

Donors to Michael’s causes say he has mastered fund-raising tactics very well. “He’s a good salesman,” says Mary Valley, head of Rickenbaugh Cadillac-Volvo, a car dealership in Denver that Michael has solicited. “He won’t usually take no for an answer.” Even at age 6, when he first visited the dealership, Ms. Valley recalls, “he had a presentation. He was very professional. His mother would come in with him, but he would do all the talking.” She adds that Michael “knows how to close the deal. He’ll ask if he can wait for the check, or when to come back.”

Michael says he never had any training in fund raising. “I kind of figured it out on my own.” Although Michael also volunteers at a local food bank, and has visited and befriended hospitalized children, he has focused on raising money because that seems to be the best way he can help, he says.

Physical Disabilities

Both Michael’s compassion and his outspokenness may be related to the challenges he has faced in overcoming his own disabilities. In addition to dealing with Treacher Collins, the high-school freshman lacks ear canals and wears prosthetic ears and a hearing aid. He has had 15 surgeries for the condition, including operations to build up his chin, and may need as many as 15 more.

Jamie Idelberg, an administrator at Children’s Hospital in Denver who has known Michael since he was 4 or 5, says that Michael is always the one who “breaks the ice” at the hospital’s summer camp session for children with cleft palates (a hole in the bony tissue in the upper part of the mouth). “The first year Michael went, another kid had a similar condition to his. He went right up to the kid and said, ‘Hey, we have the same ears.”

Some children with disabilities shrink from contact with people; Michael learned at a young age to speak up and address the discomfort others have with his unusual appearance. On his first day in kindergarten, he passed around his hearing aid so the other kids could see it. That day, he told the other kids, “I know I’m different. You don’t have to tell me,” his mother recalls. Michael says he also learned to talk back to bullies. “When I was in the first grade, I said, ‘If you think you’re perfect on the outside, check inside because I guarantee you’re not perfect on the inside, because there is no such thing as perfect.’”

He has a self-confidence bordering on brashness. “I may be at a disadvantage, but I’m not disabled,” he tells a reporter. “In fact, I’m perfectly able to do many things, including some you may not be able to do — so in that case you might be disabled.”

His mother, Gayle Munds, who also has Treacher Collins, said self-consciousness over her appearance made her somewhat retiring as a teenager, and she encouraged her son to speak up for himself. The results have exceeded her expectations. “I didn’t want him to be a wallflower, but he’s kind of over the edge,” she says, laughing. He delights in shocking others by occasionally removing his prosthetic ears, she says. “You can’t say ‘Lend me your ears’ around him.”

Helping Homeless Kids

Michael took up his newest project after discovering many homeless children have trouble learning to read, since they may frequently miss class or change schools. His grandfather, Thomas Munds, helped him meet with officials at the Family Tree House of Hope, a shelter for homeless families in Englewood, Colo. Michael said he noticed that “there was really no place for kids to study and not a lot of books to read.”

Now, he’s working on turning a 9-square-foot windowless room at the shelter into the library, says Courteney Rennick, who runs the shelter. He’s not just lining up help and donations, but also doing some of the work himself.

Michael is painting a “reading railroad” border of his own design in the room to make it more appealing to kids at the shelter.

Once the library is completed, Michael says he plans to volunteer there, helping with homework, or reading to smaller children. The maximum stay at the shelter is three months, since families are expected to actively seek permanent residences.

Michael says he wants the children to take a book with them when they leave the shelter: “a brand-new book for a brand-new life,” he says.

But before they can do so, Michael will need to start collecting books and money to buy them.

Bowling for Dollars

One tactic he’s especially likely to use to raise funds: a bowling fund-raising event. Bowlathons are how Michael, who began bowling at age 2 1/2 and now belongs to two teams, got into fund raising in the first place. Over a decade ago, Michael, then 3, insisted on participating in a league bowlathon to benefit a local hospital. He enjoyed the experience so much, he soon began raising money on his own.

Michael has run several bowlathons and done well with them, says Butch Burtscher, general manager of Brunswick Heather Ridge Lanes, in Aurora, Colo.

“People respect him, and any time he tries to do something about [a cause], they support him,” says Mr. Burtscher, who has allowed participants in Michael’s fund-raising events free use of his lanes. The most successful effort, held in 1996 to raise money to help children injured in the Oklahoma City bombing, brought in $37,000, Mr. Burtscher says.

Michael also plans to seek support from local businesses, which, he says, beats asking individuals for help. “I found out I got more money at [car] dealerships than I ever did house-to-house,” he says.

The teenager says he always approaches the managers of a business directly. “They normally give me $100,” he says. “Then I say that the company that gives me the most money will get their name on the back of my T-shirt, and if the bowlathon is televised, it’s publicity for them,” he says. Michael has gotten as much as $300 at a time that way, he reports. He’s had discouraging days too, such as when he sat around a store for over an hour waiting to see the manager, before being told the man had left for the day. But he says he doesn’t let such experiences get him down.

As Michael has grown, he says raising money has become more challenging. He now has competition from teenagers raising money for their schools or other causes. “He’s blending in with the others, instead of being a cute little 5-year-old,” his mother says.

Michael says that in this case, his disability may actually help him because he stands out from other teenagers. And “the fact that I have established myself as a fund raiser, and the fact that many people know me, helps a lot,” he says. Whether fund raising is hard or easy, he vows not to quit.

As he has become better known, Michael is frequently asked to speak at public gatherings about the importance of helping others and on behalf of specific groups. He plans to oblige as many groups as he can, despite feeling a little shy about speaking in front of large audiences. “I’m not really scared,” he says. “I can do it if I need to.”