About This Talk

How will you be remembered? What can you do right now to start crafting the legacy you will leave behind? Why does this matter? Larry J. Snyder: Hands on Philanthropist, Starbucks Community Champion, Fundraising Expert and two-time Author spends nearly every day working on his own legacy and helping others do the same. Enjoy thinking and being challenged by Larry as he helps you create the legacy you want to leave for future generations.

Larry J. Snyder spends nearly every day working to make his life better for others, all over the world. Following in the footsteps of his extraordinary Mother and accomplished Father, Larry is always seeking ways to honor them and asks others to do the same. As CEO of FOCUS Income Group, Larry is an active member of several community causes including those living unsheltered, medical missions worldwide, first access education in Africa, food rescue, freedom for faith communities, disaster relief, clean drinking water, pediatric brain tumor research, and youth mentorship. Larry and family reside in Redmond, Washington.

Transcript

Larry J. Snyder: I want to see how quiet it can be in this room for a moment. I need the ears of your heart. I'm hoping that all you hear is the crackle of the fire and the thoughts in your heart. I want you to imagine that you walk in this room and it's empty. There is just a fireplace and two chairs. You look at the one chair, and there he sits. There is Jesus. You sit down in the other chair, and this is probably the best moment of your life so far, but Jesus says, I have two questions for you. Number one, are you spending the remaining days of your life in the very best way possible? The second question requires the use of your phone. How many people in this room have ever sent a text message to themselves? Raise your hand. Good, no instruction necessary. Do me a favor and compose a text to yourself right now. Take your phone out, please. The second question and the last question. Jesus is pretty busy these days, so he is really only got time for two questions with you. He says, I want to show favor for five people in your life. Do me a favor and put in on that text to yourself, those five people in your life. I'll give you 30 seconds. You should be able to do this in 30 seconds. Five people either in heaven or here on Earth. As soon as you're done, put your phone down on the table, please. If you can't remember how to spell that one person's name, it's probably not the right person. I want you to take one minute at your table and share who those five people are with those at your table. Ready, set, go. You've got one minute.

So you're probably wondering, and I hope you're wondering, who are my five? Who are the five people that I've asked God to show favor on every day? And these are my five. Some of you in this room know who these people are, but for the next 30 minutes, I'm gonna share with you not only who they are, but how my family, my friends, my community, some people in this room have chosen to honor their lives, and that's what today is all about. I'm hopeful that the text message that you sent to yourself, you will keep forever and use that as your roadmap for these ideas that I'm about to share with you today. Today's talk is about legacy, and that's a very, it's a broad word, but what legacy means to me is not just how I'll be remembered, but how I will remember the people that matter the most to me. And again, I'm hoping that these five people who you hopefully have texted to yourself will become your roadmap and you can use these ideas.

I also want you to know that I am available at any time, actually. My better half doesn't like these phone calls at midnight, but, I am available to help you make these legacy plans for your community, for your family, whatever you wish. Let's start out with how I got here. This is my extraordinary mother. Some of you had a chance to meet my mother prior to her four year, protracted battle with vascular dementia. My mother taught thousands of small children how to read. That was her joy. She ran preschools and daycare centers in some of the toughest parts of Seattle, including Holly Park. Not the new Holly Park, the 1970s Holly Park where crack cocaine was born. In that school on Empire Way, she had 100 children under her care and those 100 kids were 100% DSHS kids. Most of those children were, their parents were in prison, so they were being raised by their uncle, by their aunt, by their grandfather, grandmother, by a friend. Anyway, one day, two kids were dropped off at the school and at 6:15 PM those kids were still there. No mom. These children were dropped off and never picked up.

And so my mother had a choice. She could put them in the van and take them to the Seattle Police Department and say, this is your problem now. But instead of doing that, she put them in the big long brown school van and brought them home to Des Moines. And I have already before these two, three other sisters, and now I have five. No one should have five sisters, but I do. I am the only son of this extraordinary mother named Jean.

Anna and Mary spent the night on the couch in our living room, and my dad said to my mother, we have enough children. Whatever happens tomorrow, you need to turn those children in to the Seattle Police Department next day. Same thing. My mother has to make a choice. She puts the kids in the brown van, pulls into the intersection of Empire Way and Kenyon turn left - keep her promise to my dad. Turn those kids in, put 'em on an even more crazy uneven path for their lives. Turn right, bring 'em home. Beg for her outrageous compassion to my father. They were there the second night in my home, and they were there for 12 years, 12 years of life. What would have happened to those children, Anna and Mary, if my mother had turned them into the police? Do you know I don't know, but I can sure imagine their life was already on a terrible trajectory.

We've tried to figure out after my mom left us, what would be the perfect way to remember her? And what I'm offering you for the next few minutes, here are a number of ways to honor your family members, your loved ones, the people you care the most about. And so please use again this next few minutes to just take note of the ways that we remembered my mother, my father, my grandfather, and two other kids who I'm going to talk about here, as a way and a method to remember yours, your legacy. And I have some good news and I have some other news for you about today's presentation. Number one, if you came here thinking that this was a legacy presentation about how you will be remembered, I have some disappointing news. This is not how you'll be remembered. It's about how you will remember others that you love. Okay? So if anybody came here thinking this was all about you, you can be excused now.

An idea came forward about remembering my mother after a trip that I took to West Africa on a delegation visit with the US Embassy and a couple of NGOs that rely on my support for them. And the idea was that, what did my mother love to do the most? Does anybody remember? She loved to teach kids how to read. So we thought, wow, where would be that place that we could remember her the most and have the most impact? Turned out to be Sulehun. Sulehun is a very small village in the eastern region of Sierra Leone. Does anyone know where Sierra Leone is? I did not. It is. It is West Africa. Well, it's literally West Africa. Anyway, so this idea came forward about building a school, a 200 child school. That would mean that my family would take on the care of 200 children in West Africa.

So we asked our friends, would you support this idea? Would you help us build a school in my mother's name so that 200 kids every year would need, would get an opportunity to learn how to read, learn how to speak English, and learn how to lead in their community? The only way out of subsistence farming in Africa is to learn how to read, learn how to speak English. And by doing that, you can quadruple your family's monthly income, just those things alone. And so that's what we did. We asked our friends to come to together and fund the development of a school in Sierra Leone in her name. And so, again, there's some how-tos in this presentation, and I'm more than willing to literally give you everything I have. If you want to do a project like this as well, in wherever you like. In Sierra Leone for 200 children, we are able to build a school, a three room school with an office, trained teachers, uniforms, a well, three latrines, and a soccer field for $75,000. What can you buy here for 75,000 bucks? A used, a used Tesla. That's it. Every year, 200 children get to learn how to read because of my mother's life. That is how we remembered my mother.

This is what it looks like, gentlemen. This is 100% built by hand, 100% level. The only tools here are large guys that look like Cam Chancellor and a whole bunch of kids helping him. If you're thinking that's an OSHA approved ladder, think again. That's a latrine. And then that is something else that's very new for these kids. That's a retention, area of water that down below has a spigot for handwashing. The spread of disease in Sierra Leone is very, very under control because of handwashing now. And there it is. The finished school, I got the opportunity to go back and be the donor representative. it was probably the biggest day of my life, second to the birth of our daughter, to be able to cut the ribbon on a school that I knew 200 children a year and a whole village would forever be changed because of their ability to read and write and speak English.

This is the other half of how I got here. My extraordinary father, I share his name, the spirit of this man. He would love being here today. He would love being among men of Christ. He would love being among a men of purpose because that's who he was. He was the best boss. He was the best husband. He was an incredible father, and he was an unbelievable spirit. People loved being around him. And there's a couple people in this room that knew him, and he would be the dad to anyone that wanted one. He loved going to Hawaii. That's all he really lived for in retirement. And with five sisters, here's where the benefit comes in of five sisters, is someone was always going to Hawaii. This guy got to go to Hawaii three times a year on one of his kids, right? So anyway, all he wanted to know, and this actually was, in the depth of Covid, and we went to Hawaii, in the depth of Covid. We watched as many Mariners games, Seahawks games together because that's what he loved to do in retirement. And that behind him is a perfect example - his living room was covered in pictures. He was honored by the hundred and 60th, the 160th Night Stalkers Special Operations Aviation Regiment for his service in Korea. He was a intelligence. Well, first of all, he was drafted when they got to Korea. They, it was, who's gonna go to the front line and who's not? They asked, does anybody have any skills? My dad raised his hand and said, "I can type 50 words a minute with zero mistakes." A general said, "You're coming with me." And he got to be the in between, between the South Korean army and the United States Army. When he was honorably discharged, he was given a literally honorable discharge paper from both armies. This, on this night, he was honored for that some 60 years after his service.

This is how we remembered my dad. He left a little bit of money behind and the instructions were simple. This is not your money. This is your money to make people happy. Our best memories were made as a family, 25 miles up Lake Chelan at that park that... Anybody ever been to 25 Mile Creek Resort? Okay, you know the little store there? On his birthday, every year, we'd fund free ice cream. Every kid, every person in the park gets to come and get free ice cream. And this little sign is in the front. This we started doing several years ago, and now these kids all look forward to their parents scheduling their family vacation during the day that free ice cream is available, all because this is how we choose to remember my dad. What day is that? The 24th of July.

He was happiest 25 miles up Lake Chelan. And at his home, he built us a home. And so my family once again got together and said, what's the best way to remember my father? And it turned out the best way is to build him a home in his name. We asked our friends to come together and help us build a home in Guatemala in his name. And I would go and I would build this house with a team. And that team built two houses in one week. Do not try and build two houses in one week unless you have some really good friends and a lot of people helping you. Again, these are the how-tos of how you can remember someone. Send this out to your friends, have a common get together and ask your friends to help build in your family's honor. This blockhouse replaced a shanty for a family. The shanty was a hundred square feet, and we built them what they believed to be a palace of 300 square feet. The kids have their own bunk beds. Mom and dad for the first time get to sleep in a bed without three kids piled on top of them, and then the shanty gets torn down or becomes the storage unit. That's what, and there's 750 blocks.

We fund, the funds that we raise, literally fund the, all of the building materials, which come from Guatemala. And there's nearly finished. You see the floor there. The floor is not quite poured yet, because I brought a small amount of my father's remains. I wanted the spirit of my father to be with this family, that the, all of the things that mattered to me as a son, I wanted this family to experience, especially the two girls, that were the children here. And so before the floor was poured, we put a little bit of my father's remains in the floor, and almost all of this was done in Spanish. That's the other thing. To have my father's name on the outside of this house means the world to me and to my family. But think about it for the people for whom now get to live in this house, they know who the spirit of Larry Snyder is. That is my father. He loved his home here, and we wanted them to love their home as well. Here's the family that got the blessing of this house. And much like a Habitat for Humanity, the family is required to help and be there the whole time. And the kids, everybody, these little kids, did a lot of the painting, carried, five gallon buckets of sand, moved everything around because that's what they're required. It took all these hands and many more to remember my father.

The idea of doing this project for my father came from Michael and his wife Carol. Michael is my brother-in-law's brother-in-law. Got it? Don't try and figure that out. But the bottom line is this special human being has made 21 trips to Guatemala to help people like me and remember family members. And I wanna say thank you to Michael. He actually made the trip all the way over from Idaho. Can you say thank you? Stand up, Michael! Say thank you. If you want to go down next February and build a home and have it dedicated to a family member, please approach Michael after today.

My grandfather. Does anyone in this room know someone that started an enterprise with less than nothing? Less than nothing. Most of us, if we think about it, we will. It will key on you. My grandfather, right up the road from here was running the Fall City Sawmill. One day, it burnt to the ground. He had no job, three kids and a wife that he needed to feed. At that time, in the 19, late 1940s, they gave you 90 days support. It was called employment security - 90 days and that was it. They provided you some money, some food, and that was it. He convinced the person that was building a furniture store across the street from the unemployment office to give him a job, and he would work for free for 30 days to prove that he could do the job of being the best salesperson. When that store opened, not only was he that, but then that owner, Mr. Israel said to him, wow, I wanna open another store. And would you take what was now known as a 'sweat equity deal' to open the second store? He opened a second store, a third store, and again, he started with less than nothing. But believe it or not, that was not his largest achievement in life.

This painting hangs in my office at my home, and I look at it every single day to remind myself that if a man can start with less than nothing, I have everything and what am I doing? I am reminded every day of the spirit of my grandfather. So how do we remember my grandfather? Well, once again, an idea came from an unsuspecting place. When my grandfather decided in the city of Burien to try and bring more commerce in the 1950s, one of the ideas was an unlimited hydroplane team. So if they put their money together as merchants hired a driver, literally brought in a already owned hydroplane. And the U-4 Miss Burien Hydroplane Team was born between my grandfather and a number of others.

So what we did to remember my grandfather was we found the hull and we restored it. And it's the same thing as building a house in Guatemala and building a school in Sierra Leone. We asked our family members to remember my grandfather, would you be willing to help us with this project? This is a race ready, fully ready to go. They can put it in the water today. And they do, that is on display at the Hydroplane Race Boat Museum. Has anyone been to the, the Hydroplane Race Boat Museum in Kent? It's an amazing display of 15 race ready Hydroplanes, including the U-4 Miss Burien. My grandfather's spirit lives on in that wonderful museum in Kent. We built this boat, or rebuilt it, turned it back over to the city in exactly the same unveiling that they did in 1958. We got some historical data from the newspaper and brought in the big band from the high school, literally recreated the uniform, everything all in the spirit of my grandfather. And the city has never been the same since Burien owns this as an asset.

I said to you earlier that what he did in business was not his biggest accomplishment. How many people in this room know someone that has had open heart surgery? Okay, how many people know someone that spoke earlier that has had a heart transplant? Dr. Lester Sauvage at Providence was doing this idea of grafting veins from the lower leg to the chest. It became known as coronary bypass surgery. My grandfather volunteered to be one of those Guinea pigs for that. He had this idea... Dr. Lester Sauvage and three other surgeons around the country, had this idea that calcification was going to kill a lot of, specifically, men. Women have a, heart disease as well. And the idea was if we take them out of the lower leg and graft them here, that it will give a new lease on life. My grandfather volunteered to be one of the first people to do this. He was the longest living trial patient in the world. He spent his entire last 20 years of his life advocating specifically on the West Coast and the Hope Heart Institute, which was again, a Seattle based research institute named after Bob Hope, because he funded the start of it. That was my grandfather's project in the last 20 years of his life was to advocate to others that open heart surgery was a good alternative. Arterial Sclerosis is the medical name.

Does anyone know who this is? This is Rachel Beckwith. Does that name anything to any of you? Okay, Rachel Beckwith was killed when a logging truck lost its load about two miles down I-90. And you all have seen this where the, every, all the traffic comes to a screeching halt, when everybody's going off to north or south 405. Anyway, this truck came down. Logging truck lost its load, crushed her car, killed her. She was a very special 7-year-old. She definitely had a heart for the Lord without really even knowing it because she had a heart for others. And she had started a Charity Water account. And when she died, she had $247 in that account. And it took $300 to get basically a well tapped through Charity Water. So there was a group of gentlemen called the Band of Brothers at the time, who got a hold of this story, this idea to help with $53 donations to make sure that Rachel got her name on a well. And there was this new idea back then called Twitter, and it was a tool that allowed me to share this idea of making a $53 donation to Charity Water in her name. After one week of this campaign, there was $150,000. Now that's amazing, but these were $53 donations. If there's any math wizards in here, that is a lot of donation, $53 donations. When this was all said and done, $1.2 million was given in Rachel's name in 90 days. It showed up on all the network TV shows, not local national, that this Twitter thing was for real and that it could be used for good that far. Number on the right, that's the number of donations given in her name; 31, almost 32,000 donations were given 53 bucks at a time. This is a picture of her mom, Sam, and her grandmother in Ethiopia. If you ever have a chance, if you just put in Rachel Beckwith Charity Water, there is a fantastic four minute video about when they went and tap these wells. It will, it will make you cry. And if it doesn't come back here, and I'll make you cry. .

I'm closing with a story about a really special friend, named Brandon. Brandon Bronze, I met through St. Jude. I was asked to host, a St. Jude fundraising event. And at every event, there's usually a St. Jude child there. And, this little guy had had... I can't imagine what how challenging, not just for him, but for his mother, Chris, what that news is like, that your son has an inoperable brain tumor and the news doesn't look good for the future. So Brandon and I sat down and talked at that first one, and he was telling me about a growth hormone shot that he takes every night because the chemotherapy is working the opposite direction. And so I said, well, you know, what about that? And he said, well, as long as I keep getting that shot, I'll probably be taller than you someday. Anyway, this kid stole my heart. His, at the time I met him, he was the same age as my daughter. And all I could think about was, how lucky am I that I have a healthy child that I get to go home to tonight? And he and his mother have to struggle on this road just to survive. So I dedicated my life to Brandon and to his mother. And one of the things that he asked me, he said, would you please come... we became friends, would you please come to my house and play Lego? Absolutely. I'll come to your house and play Lego and I'll bring my daughter.

And then at his, when we were playing Lego, he said, would you come to a radiation treatment with me? Of course, I'll come to a radiation treatment with you. How could you say no to something like that? I met him at UW. He introduced me. This is a little 7-year-old kid. He says, this is my doctor, and this is my nurse, and why don't you come in here and I'll show you exactly how they're gonna do this radiation treatment. And I'm, again, my heart is just, you know, about to bust outta my chest. And, sure enough, he shows me, this is where they're gonna put my head. This is where they put the radiation, da da, da. Anyway, we did that over and over again. I met him as often as I could at UW for these treatments. But unfortunately, through his recurrence, it looked like the disease was gonna take his life.

And so through that experience, I met a lot of extraordinary people. This gentleman on the right... that's Brandon's mom... the gentleman on the right, Dr. Jim Olson is the primary investigator for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Lab at Fred Hutch. And I said to him, Dr. Olson, you know, I can imagine what your biggest challenge is, but tell me. He said, my biggest challenge is when I open up the cranial cavity to remove a brain tumor or a tumor, I don't know where the margins are in a youth. So because the gray matter in the brain has not, has no contrast. In older people, there's contrast. But in younger people, it's just all gray. So they can see the fatty tumor, but they can't find the margins around it. So the recurrence rate is sky high. It metastasized. And Brandon was no exceptions. I said to Dr. Olson, what is it that you need? He said, I need a molecular flashlight. I need a way that I can isolate the tumor and the margins around it. And he said, I've been, I've just, I spend my whole day thinking about this 'cause that year he had diagnosed 150 children and nearly all of 'em, the disease was gonna take the child's life. Can you imagine being that person in that room with a, with two parents or one parent in saying, we did the best we could, but we couldn't find the margins around it. And that's why he or she recurred and unfortunately are gonna have to say goodbye to your child. Can you imagine being in that situation as a doctor? So he went to work on this idea and literally would talk to anyone that would listen about a molecular flashlight and guess where they found it.

This is the death stalker scorpion from Israel. Inside that is the venom that makes a new therapy called tumor paint. When tumor paint is injected into the bloodstream of a pediatric brain tumor research patient, they open the cranial cavity and it's lit up. And this is the game changer because the recurrence rate has nose dive because they can get around the margins. But the other thing that's awesome about tumor paint is it can be used for breast cancer. It can be used for MS. It can be used for lung cancer because again, it lights up these legions like a flashlight. Blaze Biosciences was part of the drug development program for tumor paint. And this is what's called the pipeline of a biotech company. All of the things. And you can see again that it's a fast track orphan drug that's almost at market. This is huge for children and especially moms and dads who get this horrible news.

I'm closing now. I want you to know that everything good in life that starts with you requires someone else to come with you. Shared humanity is my mission. My mission is to make sure that whatever you want to do to remember someone, you are willing to ask others to help you 'cause you cannot do it yourself. You can't build a school in Sierra Leone by yourself. You can't build a house in Guatemala by yourself. You can't get 31,000 people to make a donation for $53 to a little girl who wants kids in Ethiopia to drink clean water by yourself. It requires all of us. There's probably not a better organization than IMPACT Players to get stuff done. This stuff, especially, everybody wants to help. You just have to ask them. Everybody wants to make the world better. You just have to ask others.

So the $2 bill is a rare symbol in our currency, but it, to me, it's the symbol of I need you, I need you to help me. And I'm offering that to you as well. I will help anyone that needs, that wants to find that idea to remember somebody. Once again, this presentation was not about you. This presentation was about what you are willing to do to remember those that you love the most. And I've already helped you by making a list, right? So you're, you're on the way. You've got those five people. If you want help, I'm your man. I will help you in any way that I possibly can. So why do we really do this?

This is our 18-year-old daughter, Daniella. I do this because I want her to take it from here. I want my own daughter to recognize that she grew up in a house that celebrates where we came from. We came from an extraordinary mother, extraordinary father, extraordinary grandfather. I want my daughter to take that and run with it in her own way. That's why I am involved in this kind of work. As Gary mentioned, I have written a book about 12 extraordinary people like you. One of the people, chef John Howie, who is here today, is profiled in that book. It gave me a chance to share the story of people that are extraordinary to me and many other people. I am willing to sign one of those books and give a hundred percent of the proceeds to IMPACT Players today.

So that is my time. I hope I have lit a fire like that one over there because this is, in my opinion, the way that you will be remembered is what you did for the people that you love the most. God bless you. Thank you for your time.