Open Letter to Pro Athletes & Families

An Open Letter to Professional Athletes and Their Families

Please Read First

This letter extends an invitation to explore a potential community initiative. It does not constitute an offer to sell securities, nor a solicitation for investment, and should not be interpreted as financial, legal, or tax advice. Seven Years of Change is an emerging civic and economic platform, still developing its legal structure, governance, and documentation. Any references to returns describe the platform's design philosophy of accounting for financial, human, community, and environmental outcomes together. They do not describe an investable financial yield of any kind. Nothing here creates obligations for any athlete, advisor, or family member. Should a formal opportunity ever arise, it would be presented exclusively through official documentation detailing terms, risks, responsibilities, and protections. Every reader is strongly encouraged to consult with a fee-only fiduciary advisor, legal counsel, tax professional, and trusted family members before making any commitment.

I am writing this in the name of families and children who cannot afford a ticket to a game, a week at a sports camp, or even the drive to get there. That is who this letter is for. Everything else is in service of those who cannot speak for themselves.

Seven Years of Change, or 7YOC, is a community economic self-determination platform built to help working families stabilize now while building a green local economy they can own and run over seven years. Food, housing, transportation, day care, night care, elder care, work, environmental repair, debt relief, clean water, and clean air. Real infrastructure for people who have been told to wait their whole lives.

I am asking professional athletes, former athletes, families, mothers, aunts, sisters, wives, partners, and the women who have always held families and foundations together to look closely at this plan. Not as charity. Not as branding. Not as another event. As infrastructure. I am asking you to help us build something that outlives a season.

I am not speaking as an outsider to your world. I grew up near it. I moved through it. I listened inside it. I learned from it. I sat in places where agents made their pitch. I sat with families in homes, apartments, and mansions. I sat in family sections at games and listened to mothers, partners, wives, aunts, cousins, and friends talk about the real pressure behind the public image. I saw the joy, the love, the access, the money, the instability, the expectation, and the quiet fear that can sit behind all of it. I also saw how much power was sitting in those rooms. And I did not yet know how to say what I was carrying.

For years, I had an early version of this idea inside me. I knew there had to be a way to take the money, influence, relationships, and credibility in sports and direct them toward permanent community stability. I knew there had to be a way to build something better than scattered charity events, short-term camps, restaurant deals, and photo opportunities. But I failed to communicate it. I was in one of the most selfish stretches of my life, and I did not know how to build the thing I could feel. That failure was mine, not yours. I am writing now because I finally know how to say it.

To the Black athletes reading this, I want to speak plainly and with respect. I love what you have carried for your families, your teams, your cities, and your communities. I know many of you have already given more than most people will ever see. I also know that too many communities that produced great athletes are still struggling with poor food access, high rent, unsafe streets, bad air, dirty water, debt, and schools that are asked to do too much with too little.

I hope I can say this same thing to Polynesian players, Latino players, Canadian players, Australian players, hockey players from Eastern Europe, baseball players from Central and South America, and every athlete whose family story crosses borders, languages, and struggle.

My call to White players in professional sports also comes from love and memory. It is connected to my friend Pat, who played for the Arizona Cardinals and made a conscious choice to serve when he believed doing nothing was not an option.

This letter is not about guilt. It is about responsibility. It is about what becomes possible when success does not stop with one person, one contract, one foundation event, or one weekend camp. It is about building systems that protect the people who helped make that success possible.

I will not name people to shame anyone or to prove I belonged in certain rooms. I could fill pages with names. I am choosing not to. The point was never the names. The point is what we did with the access. Too often, we had fun and built nothing that lasted. I am asking you to help us make the next chapter different.

I grew up around sports and community work. My uncle Mel helped build Silicon Valley NJB, and I coached in that program. He knew far more of the players who went on to the NBA and WNBA than I did, but I saw enough to understand what youth sports can mean when adults take it seriously. My cousin, a linebacker they called Bo-Gator because once he grabbed you he was part gator and part boa constrictor, came up through the same fields and the same poverty that made food deserts out of whole neighborhoods. After the Army, I shared good times with players from professional football, basketball, and baseball teams, as well as community circles across this country. I am grateful for all of it. But gratitude is not enough.

Here is what I am asking. Not another fast-food location. Not another logo event. Not another foundation weekend that disappears by Monday morning. I am asking you to help build Nutrition Hubs, green community financing, day care businesses, night care businesses, elder care businesses, housing pathways, transportation networks, and local work engines that families can actually use.

These care businesses matter immediately. A parent who cannot find safe day care cannot work freely. A mother working nights cannot build stability without reliable night care. A family caring for an elder cannot breathe if every hour of support is too expensive. A grandparent raising children cannot do it alone. A disabled adult, an aging parent, or a working caregiver should not have to become exhausted before help arrives.

This is why 7YOC treats care as infrastructure. Day care, night care, and elder care are not side programs. They are economic engines. They create jobs. They protect children. They support elders. They help parents keep work. They help families stay together. They reduce stress before crisis hits.

They also help more than one income group. Lower-income families need care they can actually afford. Working families need care that matches real work schedules, including evenings, nights, weekends, and emergencies. Some wealthier families also need trusted care, especially for children, elders, disability support, and family members with complex needs.

7YOC can serve both without losing its mission. Families with more resources can help support the system by paying closer to market rates. That helps lower the cost for families who cannot afford market rates at all. That is not charity. That is community design.

First, fund a Nutrition Hub in the place where you went to college, grew up, or where your family still lives. A Nutrition Hub is neither a soup kitchen nor a symbolic project. It is a food production and distribution engine designed to deliver healthy meals to real homes at prices working families can afford. It is the first proof point of the entire 7YOC model.

Second, help us build day care, night care, and elder care businesses in the same communities. These businesses can begin quickly. They can hire local workers. They can train young people. They can support women, single parents, grandparents, disabled family members, elders, and caregivers who are already carrying too much. This is one of the fastest ways to relieve pressure on families. It is also one of the clearest ways for athlete families, especially mothers and women-led foundations, to lead. Many of you already understand care better than any consultant ever will. You know who watched the kids. You know who drove people to practice. You know who sat in hospitals. You know who kept the family together when money, injury, stress, or fear entered the room. That wisdom belongs at the center of this work.

Third, help us build green financing through credit unions, community banks, green banks, and mission-aligned lenders. Working people need capital they can actually reach, priced honestly, before lending becomes extraction. Your influence can move rooms; mine never will. This is where influence becomes infrastructure.

Andre Iguodala's work after basketball gives one example of what athlete leadership can become. He has shown that players can be more than endorsers. You can be investors, advisors, builders, and serious voices in rooms where capital decisions are made. 7YOC needs that kind of bridge. We need athletes and athlete families who can help foundations, credit unions, community banks, green lenders, technology partners, care providers, and local leaders sit at the same table and build something working families can use.

Fourth, help us build the whole platform. Seven Years of Change is not a charity someone writes a check to and walks away from. It is a coordinated local economy that communities own and run, with public accounting of financial, human, community, and environmental returns. The financial return is capped. The real return is measured in meals served, children protected, elders cared for, caregivers supported, jobs created, air cleaned, water protected, debt reduced, and families finally able to breathe.

To the women athletes and a special request of the WNBA: I am asking you directly. Your reach goes into field hockey, gymnastics, track and field, basketball, soccer, softball, volleyball, tennis, swimming, wrestling, and every sport the cameras still fail to cover the way they should. There are whole communities that will move when you move. I do not want you as an afterthought. I want you as a pillar.

And I want to say this clearly: many of the women reading this are college graduates, business owners, foundation leaders, organizers, teachers, nurses, attorneys, financial decision-makers, and the real strategists inside families. I am not asking you to bless this plan from the side. I am asking you to analyze it. Test it. Question it. Improve it. Then, if it is worthy, help lead it.

To the mothers of players: you may be the most important people in this entire letter. Many of you still have one foot in the community, one hand on the family, and one eye on the future. You know who needs help. You know who is pretending they are okay. You know what money can fix and what money can destroy. I am asking you to review this plan with the seriousness you would give any major family decision.

To the new players who just signed: you have a window most people never get. You have money, leverage, attention, and time before the world finishes telling you what all of it is supposed to mean. I am asking you to spend some of that window on the block you came from, the block your family lives on, or the block that raised someone who helped raise you. If you came from privilege, as I did, I am asking you to pick a community in need, where your parents grew up, where you went to college, or where you are now.

And to one former student and player I had the pleasure and honor of teaching: this one hurts me to say, but I say it with love. It saddens me that you never came to find me so we could do something magical together. I thought we had forged that kind of bond during the KONY 2012 awareness work our students took on together when I had the honor of serving as your club teacher. That campaign taught us that young people could look beyond themselves and feel responsible for children they had never met. I still wonder what we could have built while you were playing. I wonder what we could still build now. This is not a public scolding. It is a teacher saying, I saw something in you. I believed in it then. I believe in it now.

That is the love. Here is the challenge. Some of us had chances to listen and did not. I include myself first. Some of us had access and did not turn it into structure. Some of us knew families were hurting and still let charity stand in for justice. Some of us watched money move everywhere except into the systems that could have protected our own people. But that failure is not the end of the sentence. What we did not build then, I humbly ask you to help us build now.

I am asking the families and athletes of every professional sports league operating in America to invest in birds and butterflies, moose and lizards, clean air and clean water, healthy food, protected elders, safe children, supported caregivers, and working families over seven years of change. Ask the Saints players about Cancer Alley. Ask Houston families what oil, storms, flooding, and extraction have done to them. Ask any working family what it costs now just to breathe, drive, eat, cool a home, heat a home, care for children, and care for elders.

Money alone is not a return. A real return counts people, community, and planet. You have all three to give.

I can prove the relationships I have claimed, and there are many more I have chosen not to name. But I did not write this to prove anything. I wrote it to ask.

In the name of the friends I lost, the families I love, the students I taught, the athletes I knew, the mothers I listened to, the elders who deserve better, the caregivers who need relief, and the children who still cannot afford the ticket, the camp, or the ride there:

Come build something that lasts.

Green is how we live.

With respect and with love,

Geoff Barrett

Founder, Seven Years of Change

Seven Years of Change  ·  sevenyearsofchange.org  ·  connect@sevenyearsofchange.org

This letter names people who have passed. Their families are always welcome to reach us at connect@sevenyearsofchange.org.