Photo by Chris Cone

Two days before Thanksgiving 2002, the 4th graders of Irving Primary in Peoria, Illinois, gathered in the school's gym for an assembly. The students were restless, Jen Wilfong (GMP 3, 2007) recalls. They were chatting and jostling one another and had little interest in what Wilfong was saying. "Except when I said, ‘I'm going to give you all thousand-dollar scholarships,'" she says. "Their heads snapped up."

Wilfong was there to kick off the Can Do 4:13 Scholarship Program, which she founded to help "these 4th graders get to the 13th grade." She told the students that after they graduated from high school, they would have up to 10 years to use the scholarship money for additional education. Some might choose apprenticeships, others trade schools, and still others two- or four-year colleges. Even more than money, Wilfong wanted to give these 9- and 10-year-olds—many of them Hispanic and Black students from lower-income families in struggling neighborhoods—hope for a successful future. The kids were attentive as the assembly concluded, but, Wilfong later learned, they didn't expect this stranger to follow through on her unexpected promise. "They assumed that I wouldn't execute," says Wilfong with a laugh.

Those 4th graders didn't know that "can do" was a mantra for Wilfong long before she entered their gym. A championship-winning basketball player at Indiana University who retained that no-quit attitude as an executive at Caterpillar, she named the scholarship program for her favorite Biblical verse: "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."

"I was going to do this," she emphasizes. "It wasn't optional."

Wilfong seeded the scholarship fund with $5,000 she inherited from her grandmother. But it wasn't a tribute. When Wilfong was in college, her grandmother wasn't comfortable with her bringing home Black teammates to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family. Wilfong wanted to use her money to help others who didn't come from the same background.

Wilfong found that purpose on her drive between her suburban Illinois home and Caterpillar headquarters, then in Peoria, Illinois, which took her through the city's poorest neighborhoods. A serious illness in Wilfong's mid-30s led her to reevaluate the way she spent her time. Wilfong realized she didn't want to wait until retirement to give back to the community.

After the successful launch in 2002 of Can Do, Wilfong's fundraising—through events like a children arts auction and a community 5K walk and run—allowed the nonprofit to make the same commitment to the 4th graders of the following year and each of the subsequent 5 years. By the time the first cohort turned 18, the nonprofit had doubled its scholarship promise, affording graduating seniors access to $2,000 for future pursuits as well as an additional $5,000 to finish a four-year college degree. To date, more than 70 students have received an average of $3,300 in scholarship funding, and the Can Do students graduated at a higher rate, Wilfong notes.

Four years after her initial commitment, Can Do expanded to include a mentoring component, as requested by the students themselves. "‘We need to be able to get through high school,' they told me," Wilfong recalls. She recruited nearly 40 adults to mentor the students; they used the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teenagers, by Sean Covey (MBA 1994), as a curriculum. "The kids saw all these people really caring for them," Wilfong says. That support made a difference.

As the 20th anniversary of Can Do approached in 2022, Wilfong—now an executive coach at Merrill Lynch and a real estate investor—reconnected with participants who had benefited from the initial scholarships. One student from that original group, with whom she had remained close, followed in her footsteps, playing basketball in college, getting a business degree, and working at Caterpillar. Wilfong had been planning to wind down the program, as the last of the "Can-Do kids" entered their mid-twenties, but scholarship recipients convinced her otherwise. Now, with their assistance to raise money and recruit volunteers, she's hoping to launch Can Do in other cities. "We can make such a huge difference with a little effort," she explains. "It doesn't take much to change kids' lives."

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