A New Line on the Map: Connecting Generosity to Opportunity

By: Ricky Austin

Dear friends,

If all your time, commitment, and generosity that went into the Night of Light resulted in helping just one child, it would still be worth it. 

And yet, because of you, it isn’t just one child who will benefit from our September event. At this year’s Night of Light, more than 750 people came together — friends, teachers, school leaders, donors, and families — and raised $1.3 million (and counting) for Aim Higher scholarships. Those gifts will open doors for hundreds of children, each with their own story and carrying their own light.

Ricky Austin is the president of the Aim Higher Foundation.

But what struck me most that night wasn’t the total raised. It was the choice everyone in that room made: the choice to hope.

Hope doesn’t always announce itself with fanfare. Sometimes it looks like a teacher staying after school to help a struggling student. Or a grandparent driving a child to class each morning. Or an entire community standing on a sidewalk cheering as Sophia Forchas returns home from the hospital.

That’s what Catholic schools do. They make hope visible. 

In his recent reflection marking the 60th anniversary of Gravissimum Educationis, Pope Leo XIV urged us to “draw new maps of hope.”  Education, he wrote, must not only preserve what is good, but chart new paths toward what is possible. That is what the Aim Higher Foundation strives to do. Each scholarship becomes a new line on that map—connecting generosity to opportunity, belief to belonging.

In the months ahead, we have even more reason to choose hope. With your support, the Aim Higher Foundation will award a record number of scholarships next year — meaning more doors opened and more families reached. On the horizon, the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit promises to expand opportunity even further, offering states like ours a historic chance to make faith-based education accessible to thousands more families.

If the Night of Light were held for one child, it would still be worth it. But because it is for many, it has become something enduring—a testament to what faith and community can still achieve when we choose, deliberately and together, to hope.

In service,