Who:Brandon Carr | CB, Baltimore Ravens | 32 years old
What: The Carr Cares Foundation, which provides tools, resources and inspiration to increase child literacy.
Why: Carr's mother and aunts were teachers, and when he asked his then-5-year-old daughter where her classmates struggled most in school, she said reading.
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Brandon Carr acts out the book's characters.
He makes up different voices. He oohs over photos, gestures to all the kids listening to him and reads these books aloud exactly how his mother once read to him. His mother read books in a way, Carr said, "that made them come alive."
And that is precisely why Carr's passion is literacy.
Carr is in his 11th season as an NFL cornerback. He's the league leader for consecutive starts by an active defensive player (166 and counting), and he's also the Baltimore Ravens player who regularly goes to a local elementary school to read. Aloud. And sweats while he does it.
"Of course I'm sweating," Carr said with a laugh. "You have to get into it. You have to be animated so the kids get into it, too. Because if you can't read, you can't do much with your life."
For six years now, the Carr Cares Foundation has been implementing literacy initiatives in schools from Carr's hometown of Flint, Michigan, to Dallas, Texas, where he resides in the offseason. In Flint, Carr has built three reading centers inside libraries at Dye, Doyle-Ryder and Durant-Turri-Mott elementary schools, stocking each with hundreds of books, audio-visual equipment and comfy bean bag chairs -- or, in other words, all the accoutrements of a fun place to hang out. His foundation covers the salaries of reading coaches for each center, and two of the coaches are his now-retired elementary school teachers.
In Dallas, the foundation has created and underwritten a mentorship program pairing high school students with children in elementary school. In Baltimore, he's done the same with eighth-graders as the mentors. The students meet twice a week, with an agenda set by the foundation, and Carr said he's recently partnered with the Barbara Bush Foundation, which shares Carr's mission of improving literacy, to track results like the year-to-year reading scores of participants. But even beyond hard data, he said, he's anecdotally heard from students and teachers "that there's not only been an increase in reading proficiency, but in character and confidence."
"The most important thing is that once we step into a school, we're there to stay," Carr said. "Kids need to know that people are committed them."
A two-time national champion at Division II Grand Valley State, Carr was selected in the fifth round of the 2008 NFL Draft by the Chiefs. While there, he said, he was heavily influenced by the works off the field of team president Carl Peterson, head coach Herm Edwards and veteran guard Brian Waters.
"Brian Waters showed me by example what it meant to be a player on Sundays, but also a community leader every other day of the week," Carr said.
Being a leader was a mandate instilled in him by his parents long ago. His mother, Kathy, was an early childhood educator for 33 years, before cancer claimed her in 2014. Her favorite students to teach were kindergarteners, as they first started learning to read, and Carr said there wasn't a year where his mother didn't set aside something extra from the weekly family budget for one or another of her students.
Carr's father, meanwhile, at some point worked every shift as a supervisor at a Ford plant. But John Carr's schedule never prevented him from coaching his son's AAU team. Brandon remembers him running a practice, showering and going straight to an overnight shift -- and still always being the man his friends turned to for guidance.
"My dad was a father figure to many of my peers and teammates," he said. "Both of my parents served the community in different aspects. Being connected to your community, helping your community -- it was just the way I was raised."
And so, Carr's whole time in Kansas City, he'd spend plane rides jotting down ideas of what he could do with his platform. In 2012, he signed a lucrative free-agent contract with the Dallas Cowboys. Feeling that he had both a big stage and momentum on his side, he launched his foundation soon after.
Over the years, the foundation's focus has grown. His annual football camp covers nutrition and lifestyle choices, in addition to the game's skills. In two weeks, he'll gather a group of teammates for a packing party at the Ravens facility, where they'll put together 250 boxes for women undergoing chemotherapy, stocking each with a journal, warm socks, moisturizers and various other things that comforted his own mother as she battled breast cancer. Carr's wife and father will do the same in Dallas next month, and while he'll personally deliver boxes in Baltimore, they'll do it on his behalf in Dallas.
And that's because the work of the Carr Cares Foundation is indeed personal to Carr. Back in 2016, he wrote checks totaling $110,000 to two funds addressing the devastating water crisis in his hometown. The trouble had begun in 2014, when Flint changed its water supplier. Lead from old pipes bled into the water, and the elevated lead levels created a host of health issues. Just last week, a New York Times report said there are babies in the city whose mothers have never bathed them in anything but bottled water.
"I look at the kids coming up, exposed to this water, and that could've been myself," he said. "I'm a product of that city. The water crisis blindsided us and compounded everything else going on there now with the economy."
Here's the key to what Carr did and continues to do, though: He donated to address the infrastructure issues and the cleaning up of the water sources, not just to buy cases of water. Carr is fueled by programs that grow, not short-term fixes.
"I want the community to raise itself up," he said. "I want to create avenues for our programs to grow themselves."
Carr said he once dreamed of starting a charter-school system, or something akin to LeBron James' I Promise School, a public elementary school in James' hometown of Akron, Ohio. While he's not fully closed the book on that idea, he said now he's eyeing building community centers in the states he's connected to instead.
"We can have our own after-school programs and a weekend curriculum. We can bring in other educational programs, and help them with resources. We can get mentoring and tutoring programs in, and we can take on community service as a group," Carr said, his voice picking up speed as he talks about his vision. Carr's passion is obvious, and while he talks seriously about "building a war chest," and jokes about "wishing I could speak things into existence," the words always ultimately come back to making education, and literacy in particular, more attainable.
"It doesn't matter if you're in North Dallas or Flint or Baltimore. It doesn't matter what the color of your skin is or how much money you have," he said. "If you can read, the whole world opens to you."
