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The donor: Michael Kessel
The gift: Raising $160,000 and climbing
The cause: The Heart and Stroke Foundation
When Michael Kessel was growing up in Chicago, he took up a sport few kids take seriously: table tennis.
He was good enough to be ranked in the United States, but dropped the sport once he headed to university. When he came to Toronto in 2009 to run a health care provider called the Cleveland Clinic Canada, he discovered that many people he met in the business world had a secret passion for Ping-Pong.
"As I spoke with more and more people, [I found] a lot of people grew up playing Ping-Pong that kind of gave it up," Mr. Kessel recalled.
He'd joined the Heart and Stroke Foundation as a volunteer and decided to turn his interest in table tennis into a fundraising event. That led to the creation of the Cardiac Smash Ping Pong Tournament, a one-day competition in Toronto involving 64 teams and 300 players. There have been two annual events so far and they have raised $160,000 in total for the foundation.
Mr. Kessel is already working on next year's tournament and he's planning another event involving a different sport. "This is one of these things that I want to be sustainable," he said. "I want this thing to live on forever."
Paul Waldie