Rod Stewart Steps Up To Help A Disabled Teen
Connor Donnelly is 18 years old, from Mauchline in Ayrshire, Scotland, and is wheelchair-bound, blind, and nonverbal. His family had been locked in a three-month battle with Universal Credit, the UK benefits system, trying to secure the financial support he needs when Sir Rod Stewart read about their situation in the Daily Record. He called to help immediately and pledged £5,000. His statement was brief and characteristic: when I read the story of this young man in the Daily Record I immediately wanted to help. He then added: we are both speechless. It is a line that works on two levels, one of them entirely unintentional, and it landed exactly the way those kinds of moments do when a celebrity says something genuinely human without trying to be clever. The family's three-month ordeal is now over. The donation is on its way. Rod Stewart is 81 years old, the Maggie May singer who this week also announced his final ever tour, and he used part of the same week to write a cheque for a teenager he read about in the paper because it seemed like the right thing to do.
The gesture fits a pattern that stretches back years. Just over a year before the Donnelly donation, Stewart donated £4,000 to a fundraiser in memory of Aiden McLuckie, a 14-year-old Celtic supporter who died after being struck by a car on the A76. Two months before that, he stepped in to help four-year-old Iain Gregori, a boy caught in what was described as a blackhole while waiting for an autism diagnosis in a Scottish health system that had stopped putting children with autism and ADHD on the waiting list for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services appointments. In previous years he has donated to the NHS, Great Ormond Street Hospital, homelessness charities, refugee support organizations, The Prince's Trust, and the British Heart Foundation. He donated to Sara Cox's Children in Need marathon challenge and left her an encouraging message to get her through the final hours. He placed a £10,000 charity bet with former Rangers manager Graeme Souness on the outcome of a Scottish football title race, the money going to whichever man's chosen charity lost, just for the fun of it. He has given signed albums, concert tickets, and bottles of his own whisky to fundraising events around Scotland with the same ease other people bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party. When asked why he keeps doing it, he has never given a complicated answer. Reading about a boy in the paper and wanting to help is, for Rod Stewart, apparently a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
Source:https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/rod-stewart-donates-thousands-disabled-34693091
