Aid for the most needy

Tyson Jon Ray, founding partner of FORM Wealth Management Group in Lake Geneva, Wis., received the Global Community Impact Award for the care and community development projects that his nonprofit, Children’s World Impact, sponsors for widows and orphans in developing countries.

Mr. Ray and his wife, Jenny, created a private foundation in 2006 as a way to get money directly to causes without losing any of it to administrative costs.

But the couple decided to create a public nonprofit following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and affected three million.

Since the disaster struck, his group has helped serve patients, built an elementary school and a boys’ home, and annually provides 450,000 meals for orphans, among other support. It also has expanded its work to include projects in Ghana.

“When we started the foundation, we were tired of sending money to an organization where it nibbled at the money before it got to where it was supposed to go,” Mr. Ray said. “When we made it public, we did so with the promise that the board of directors would cover all of the administration expenses. So if someone gives us $1, 100% of that is going to go for whatever we raised that money for.”

He recounted that during one Haiti trip, he went for a walk and was thinking about whether his nonprofit efforts were what he was meant to do with his life when he isn’t working, helping to raise his three sons and completing triathlons. He was shocked when he noticed a shipping container being unloaded.

Inside, part of that cargo was the load of meals that 500 volunteers had packaged up many months before in Wisconsin.

“It was like I put a message in a bottle and it got there, and I opened it up,” Mr. Ray said, accepting it as a sign that his life was on track.

Mr. Ray plans to use the $20,000 award from Invest in Others Charitable Foundation to buy food that can be packaged into 450,000 meals and be shipped overseas for those in need.