by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
One horrible night in March 2000, Richard Kish’s life changed forever — his 19-year old son, Dustin, died in a tragic car accident and left a loving family reeling.
The family’s love and the wish to keep Dustin’s memory alive led the Kish family to form the Dustin E. Kish Memorial Foundation for the purpose of granting college scholarships to high school graduates in Jacksonville and to provide safety and training presentations to the families of Jacksonville.
“We started doing things early,” said Kish, who works for Prudential Network Realty, Inc. “In lieu of flowers, we wanted donations to be made to the foundation to fund the scholarships. We give out five $1,000 scholarships a year for graduating seniors. They have to complete an application and write essays focused on safety related issues. We’ve given out 15 already.”
Though Dustin’s accident was not a result of lack of safety, Kish is very focused on getting the safety message across to parents and children.
“My primary objective is that I don’t want to see other parents go through what I have gone through,” he said. “This is the most painful thing you could ever imagine. If we can save one child from getting hurt or one child from being abducted, we can keep them from going through this nightmare because it never gets better.”
Kish said teenagers today are just into too many things. They have school, work, cell phones, the gym, their friends and recreation.
“You look at the kids and you know how tired we get,” he said. “With all the distractions with the CD players, DVD players in the dashboard and all these things kids do it is dangerous.”
The funds for the scholarships come from the Dustin E. Kish Memorial Car and Truck Shows put on by the foundation at Florida Community College of Jacksonville’s South Campus each year.
“The kids bring their cars in to compete,” said Kish. “I look for corporate sponsorships and I sell T-shirts. This year we are doing a sound competition and adding motorcycles to the show.”
Kish said Dustin was loved showing cars., so it was a natural transition to hold car shows to raise money for the foundation.
Safety is another focus of the foundation and Kish said they like to have two or three safety expositions a year.
“I like to get the audience of the teenagers and young adults at the car shows because they need to hear something positive about slowing down and doing the right things,” said Kish. “At the car shows, I hand out a lot of safety literature about road rage, drinking and driving and have a lot of safety presentations at the shows.”
The next show is scheduled for May 14.
Another thing Kish does through the foundation is to counsel parents who have lost a child.
The foundation is also very involved with providing family safety programs such as Child Identification, Amber Alerts, Child Car Seat Inspections and many more.
In September, Prudential sponsored a safety exposition for the Dustin E. Kish Memorial Foundation at its Arlington/Southside office.
More than 60 attended the event, which included child identification by the Grand Lodge of Florida, car seat inspections and installation training by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and Amber Alert training by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
“We are trying to focus on parents who have young children and make sure they are doing things as safely as they can for their child,” he said. “We are going to try and partner throughout the Prudential Agencies to do the safety events all over town.”
Because Prudential is a major supporter of the foundation, Kish has found some interesting avenues to market, not only the Prudential Network Realty name, but his foundation.
He recently had a link off of his website, www.sunmist.com, where people could sign up to win free movie tickets to see “Shark Tale.”
“I’m partnering with Entertaining U, who have the rights to some Disney movies,” said Kish. “We pay for the movie and then we get to advertise our company’s name at those movie’s premiers. We also would like to incorporate the safety events at the theater. That way when the parents come in with their child, they can do some of the training things right there in the movie theater.
“We are trying to make it as easy as we can for people to come. Saturdays are getting difficult to get anything personal done, so to pack up your kids on a Saturday morning to come to a safety event is hard. But, if the families are already there, for a movie then you already have your audience.”
They have updated the child identification process by digitally taking a photo and putting all the information on a floppy disk for the parents to take with them.
For information on the foundation, go to www.dkish.org.