Gary Kadow is the first to tell you that he has had a fortunate life.
He rose through the ranks of the Western New York Savings Bank to become executive vice president. He launched a second profession as a top executive with the US Department of Housing and Development when the bank was sold, spending six of his sixteen years at the White House advising presidents on housing policy.
For nearly 40 years, he has also worked as an ordained Episcopal pastor in his New York church’s healing ministry, which, he claims, has produced true miracles for those in its care.
After relocating to The Villages over a decade ago, Kadow founded Project SOS, a veteran’s organization. It all started with a phone call from his son, an Iraqi soldier, who described how much medical supplies were needed offshore. Project SOS acquired and supplied enough supplies to support 23 US armed forces clinics in the Middle East, as well as a 10-bed children’s hospital in Afghanistan.
However, Project SOS became a more domestic and highly localized mission a few years ago, supporting veterans in Central Florida, especially homeless veterans living in the Ocala National Forest. Kadow performs this currently as an assistant priest at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in northeast Ocala, which supplies 15,000 pounds or more of food and other things to these low-income veterans’ families in the forest each month from four different locations.
Among all of those achievements, Kadow recently revisited one that he considers the most rewarding: the yearly awarding of Project SOS’s U.S. Military Children’s Scholarship Fund.
The initiative awarded $4,000 scholarships to ten Marion County high school students.
“This is my pride and joy,” Kadow, a Village of Lynnhaven resident, remarked. “It was unusual because I thought COVID would have affected us in a negative way, but the Lord really does provide. We’ve never come up short yet.”
The scholarship program has been running for six years.
“It just kind of came to me,” Kadow said, recalling his admiration for the clever youngsters.
And he wished to assist them.
“We have some amazingly sad stories out there,” he said, citing one student who had to relocate out of her house this year because bedbugs and roaches stopped her from studying. “The only way to break the band of poverty was through education. They have no chance of getting out of that without an education.”
The scholarship candidates are ninth-graders who have an immediate family member who served in the armed forces and whose families live in poverty. They and their parents agree that the student will study for at least two hours every night during high school and will resist drugs, alcohol and crime. Those who succeed are eligible for a two-year scholarship to any public college in Florida. They can reapply for money to finish education if they maintain good grades.
Project SOS has now benefited 81 youngsters with approximately $160,000 in scholarships, according to Kadow. While the majority of the youngsters live in Marion County, Kadow claims that The Villages is where the majority of the contributors come from. This year’s group, he noted, was the first to receive their own laptop computers thanks to a Villages contributor.
“The people in The Villages are so wonderful,” Kadow said. “They are so generous and so loving, and we do what we can to turn these lives around.”