Soccer Champion Mia Hamm Scores as Charity Fund Raiser

The soccer star Mia Hamm gives away about $100,000 a year through the foundation

she started in 1999. But just five years ago, Ms. Hamm was on the other side of the giving equation, collecting donations in an empty pickle jar from people she’d just met to help offset her brother’s medical expenses.

In 1996, just after she helped the U.S. women’s soccer team win its gold medal in the Atlanta Olympics, Ms. Hamm visited a girls’ soccer club in Milwaukee. After her soccer talk and clinic, she passed around a homemade brochure about aplastic anemia, a bone-marrow disease that afflicted her brother Garrett, and asked the club’s participants to give what they could.

Ms. Hamm collected $600 that day. “We couldn’t get a firm answer [from the insurance company], and so I thought, I don’t care if I have to beg. I don’t know how much this is going to cost. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure he has a chance,” says Ms. Hamm. She recalls being overwhelmed by the response to her appeal. “It was amazing,” she says. “I didn’t know these people from Adam, and here they were opening up their hearts and their community, and they have become tremendous friends.”

That experience made her want to do more. Each year since then, she and the friends she made in Milwaukee have staged the Garrett Game, a fund-raising event featuring All-American college athletes who compete against Ms. Hamm and her Olympic and World Cup teammates.

Although her brother died in 1997, at age 28, from complications related to a bone-marrow transplant, Ms. Hamm has continued to organize the event to help others with the disease. In 1999, she decided to create the Mia Hamm Foundation, which has about $600,000 in assets. The foundation now runs the Garrett Game to raise money for the Children’s Hospital Foundation of Wisconsin and for its own grant-making program.

Run by College Friend

The Mia Hamm Foundation is run by Dan Levy, a former college classmate of Ms. Hamm’s from the University of North Carolina.

Besides raising money for charities that help people with bone-marrow diseases, the Garrett Game also provides an occasion to introduce bone-marrow donors to their recipients for the first time, which Ms. Hamm describes as an emotional moment.

“It’s just powerful,” says Ms. Hamm. “No matter what is going on in your life, or the way you feel about things, you walk away from that event feeling like you have done something good.”

The foundation also sponsors an annual golf tournament to raise money for the Garrett J. Hamm Fund at the University of North Carolina Hospital and for the foundation’s grant-making program.

Besides giving away money to medical groups, Ms. Hamm wants to use the foundation to recruit more bone-marrow donors. Her brother, who was adopted and whose birth mother was Thai, had had a difficult time finding a compatible marrow match because relatively few people of Asian ancestry have joined the national bone-marrow registry. Ms. Hamm’s foundation recently persuaded Nike to help recruit volunteers for the national registry. A recent drive at the company’s Nike Town stores signed up 500 prospective bone-marrow donors.

In addition to donating her speaking fees to her foundation, Ms. Hamm often contributes payments she receives from other projects, such as lending her name and likeness to two Nintendo soccer video games or writing a story for “Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul.” She has also raised money for the foundation by persuading her corporate sponsors — including Nike and Mattel — to make contributions, and by auctioning a trip to the 2000 Sydney Olympics through eBay.

Getting Girls to Be Athletic

In addition to its work on bone-marrow disease, the foundation also encourages girls to be active in sports. So far, it has awarded a $5,000 grant to Liv In the Game, a nonprofit sports and mentor program for fifth-grade girls in Austin, Tex. Ms. Hamm’s mother, Stephanie Dillon Hamm, became the charity’s development director after she learned about the group from the foundation, where she is a board member. (Stephanie Hamm plans to excuse herself from any further decisions about the foundation’s support of the charity.)

Mia Hamm also supports a $2,500 annual college scholarship for a female athlete from her alma mater, Lake Braddock High School, in a Washington suburb. This year she created Hamm’s Heroes, purchasing 40 tickets for each Washington Freedom home game and giving them to Washington-area groups to send needy or sick youngsters to the games.

“People always go, ‘Where did you get this motivation?’” says Ms. Hamm. “I can’t remember a day growing up that my parents weren’t volunteering or helping start up a group, and they continue to give their time and energy to people who are less fortunate.”

Ms. Hamm’s agent, David Bober, says she faced two choices: “One is to go narrow and deep, and the other is to spread yourself around and do a little bit to help a lot of people.”

He adds: “Mia wanted to pick things that were important to her personally — bone-marrow disease and trying to encourage more girls to play sports. She has managed to make a bigger impact that way than if she did one or two things for 30 to 40 organizations.”