Submitted by: Vanguard University
Written by: Mark Orphan
On August 29, 1985, I showed up at Southern California College (now Vanguard University) in Costa Mesa from Illinois, having received an acceptance letter but with literally no money. They would not let me move into the dorms or register for classes because I could not cover the required 30 percent down payment. I had flown in on a one-way ticket. I had been helping my mom raise my little brothers, so she had no ability to help. I didn’t know anyone at SCC, but I found a professor whose name I had heard but had never met. I told him my story because I knew that he had previously worked at my home church in Illinois. Offering very little hope that he could help, he asked me to give him an hour to make a couple of calls. When I returned, he told me that someone who insisted on remaining anonymous had agreed to make the down payment. This anonymous donor’s generosity inspired me to make good on his investment by working tirelessly to earn my degree in four years while working every spare hour I had to fund the rest of my education.
That same year, Wayne Tesch, a pastor at the church on our campus, launched the very first Royal Family KIDS Camp with a vision to give kids in foster care a week filled with positive memories and hope every summer. The initial vision was to have one camp serving kids in foster care in Orange County. Today, there are hundreds of camps every summer throughout the country and in several other countries. As an intern at the church, my experience every summer and my personal exposure to the plight of foster kids and the difference a week at camp could make were life-transforming. Because the church was on the college campus, the overwhelming majority of the volunteers who ran the camp each summer were SCC students, professors, and staff members. This program lit a fire of compassion and generosity at the college as students and faculty raised awareness and funds year-round to support the camp and then took a week of their vacation every summer to serve foster kids.
Hundreds of alumni continue to support and serve this program and other foster care programs in Orange County and around the country to this day. Like many other students over the years, this experience prompted me to make serving foster kids a part of my family and career pursuits.
In the late 1990s, I learned that Glenn Kraiss was the anonymous donor who had paid the down payment for me to start my first semester of college. When I attended his memorial service in 2014, his brother shared a story I had not heard before. As a hard-working 18- year-old kid from a family with no money, Glenn aspired to be a pharmacist because a work supervisor had encouraged the potential he saw in him. He enrolled at the University of Illinois even though his parents told him they could not fund his education. Late that summer, Glenn was notified that his application would be withdrawn if he did not submit the down payment. Days before the financial registration deadline, his store manager contacted the university and paid his way. After graduation, Glenn worked his entire career for that company and eventually retired as the third-highest executive in the entire organization. Glenn lived a life of generosity, seeking out young people in whom he saw potential and investing in their futures.
Just a few months after that memorial service, I reached out to some donors and raised the seed money to launch a scholarship fund in Glenn’s name at Vanguard to support young men and women coming out of foster care. The Glenn S. Kraiss Memorial Scholarship Fund grew very slowly for the first 11 years. In 2025, inspired by the need and by the impact on the small number of students we were serving, the In-N-Out Burger Foundation stepped up and invested $900,000 in a three-year capacity-building strategy to grow our program from three students in 2024 to 18 students in 2027. Today, we are on pace with 16 students in the program entering this fall semester. We have an on-campus support office and are consistently adding layers of critical wraparound support to help our students succeed.
We challenge our students, even before graduation, to seek out ways to support kids who have not yet had the opportunities they have been gifted. It is inspiring to see them seek
out these opportunities through volunteerism, fundraising, and other forms of service. One of our current scholarship students, who participated in Royal Family KIDS Camp in Orange County for several summers, raises funds throughout the year and then serves as a counselor at camp each summer. Another makes and sells costume jewelry online and donates much of what she earns to Orangewood Foundation.
One of my classmates in the mid-1980s, Mike, came to SCC from East Los Angeles. He had been adopted and raised by a single mom with no money. Her church helped support him in attending SCC, and he worked hard to see it through and graduate. A group of us became not only close friends but family to Mike during college and for the decades that followed. Mike never moved out of Costa Mesa, where he had found a sense of belonging during college. In August 2025, he had agreed to meet with one of our Headwind Scholars to mentor him. The Saturday before we were scheduled to have lunch with our student, Mike passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack. Inspired by Mike’s story, his life, and his desire to give back, a group of us who were classmates with Mike in the 1980s have formed the beginnings of a “Flight Crew” in his name. Our Flight Crew strategy is just being launched. A group of up to 12 alumni and friends who share a common affinity for the university will commit to collectively sponsoring one of our program applicants for four years. This will be the first of 20 Flight Crews we hope to form to help sustain our program.
Our friends at In-N-Out Burger Foundation have shared with us their desire to multiply the impact of their generous investment by replicating the success of the Headwind Scholars program at other universities in other states where they do business.
This story started with two men in 1985—Wayne Tesch and Glenn Kraiss—who separately lit a fire of generosity and impact at this small college. That fire has had a life-changing impact on thousands of foster kids in Orange County and beyond. Today, that fire is growing in ways that will inspire generations of investors and benefit generations of foster kids and young adults. I only mention my part in this story because I have been blessed to observe, from 1985 until now, how the generosity of time and resources by a growing number of individuals has become a force for the benefit of countless foster kids. The impact is quite remarkable when you consider the thousands of kids served every summer through camps and those now being served by our Headwind Scholars program. Who knows how many young adults in the future will be served by scholarship programs at other universities that replicate this model?
What began with one anonymous gift to a struggling 18-year-old has become a legacy of generosity that continues to multiply. One person’s investment inspired another generation to
serve foster children. The generosity of donors, volunteers, alumni, foundations, faculty, staff, and students continues to create opportunities for young people to change the trajectory of their lives—and, in turn, to become generous people who invest in others.
That is the power of philanthropy: one act of generosity can become a legacy that continues to give for generations.
