In March 2020, COVID-19 shut the doors to the ASU Speech and Hearing Clinic at the College of Health Solutions, but it didn’t end services to clients. A generous donation from the Phoenix Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Foundation allowed the clinic to pivot to telehealth services and keep providing therapy to those in need despite stay-at-home orders. The Masons also funded four scholarships to support graduate students training to be speech-language therapists.
Building blocks of success
“Around 20% of kids in America have challenges on some level with speech or reading,” said Mike Bernhardt, a member of the Scottish Rite Phoenix chapter and one of the board members for the chapter’s charitable foundation. “These are very capable kids, and we’re very proud to be serving them because there’s a connection between the ability to read, the ability to learn and the ability to be free-thinking.” 
Alma Strasser, director of development for the College of Health Solutions, accepted several donations from the Phoenix Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Foundation earlier this year to support ASU Speech and Hearing Clinic programs and scholarships for speech-language pathology students. Pictured (from left): Phoenix Scottish Rite Foundation board members Mike Bernhardt, Curtis White and Tony Darin. Photo courtesy of Mike Bernhardt Download Full Image
Fellow Mason and board member Tony Darin works with Bernhardt in the Scottish Rite Foundation and notes Scottish Rite has been committed to children’s learning success for more than 100 years. In the 1950s, that commitment expanded to include supporting speech and language therapy for children. Today, Scottish Rite Masons fund nearly 180 RiteCare Centers, clinics that provide therapy for a range of childhood communication issues. Literacy is also a focus for the Masons.
That’s why Bernhardt and Darin’s chapter reached out to Kelly Ingram, clinical professor at the College of Health Solutions, four years ago and began supporting the Summer Program for Elementary Literacy and Language (SPELL). “
This program is for children who are falling behind the state’s standards for reading,” Ingram explained. “It’s essentially a therapy camp, and the Scottish Rite provided scholarship funds for families who cannot afford to send their children to the camp.”
A pandemic pivot
SPELL camp provided daily, three-hour sessions at the clinic until 2020 forced remote learning.
“It’s hard to keep a second grader’s attention for three hours in an online format, so we had to shift what we were doing,” said Tracey Schnick, the clinic’s business manager. “We shortened some of our programs, which reduced the cost of them a bit.”
Then, to keep delivering services to clients who might be struggling financially due to pandemic job cuts, Ingram and Schnick asked the Scottish Rite team if they would provide a gift to cover a broad variety of clients in need.
“They said ‘yes,’ and that allowed us the freedom to provide a wide range of services that could not be covered any other way,” Ingram said.
Thanks to Scottish Rite’s support, 86 patients received free group and individual treatment for a total of 220 telehealth sessions throughout the summer in 2020.
“They were a huge part of our success, and we are so thankful that with their help we were able to provide services to those in need last summer,” Ingram said.
Training therapists for tomorrow’s kids
Shifting to online service delivery was essential not only for the clinic’s clients — telehealth services were also a lifeline for College of Health Solutions graduate students. As part of their training, speech-language pathology students work one-on-one with clients and the children who participate in SPELL camp.
“Support from the Scottish Rite literally saved last summer for our own students because they need a certain number of hours of clinical work,” Schnick said. “They can do some by simulation, but a lot of the hours have to be with actual clients. Without the telehealth services the Scottish Rite funded, we don’t think we would have been able to fill summer schedules, which could have delayed these students' graduations by a semester or more."
Along with keeping programs running, the local Masons also fund the Scottish Rite Graduate Fellowship, a gift that is helping four master’s degree students pay for their studies this year.
“Having a stipend like that means many graduate students can concentrate on their studies rather than having to work. This allows them to spend more hours at an internship site,” Ingram said.
None of the students selected for the fellowships this year had any personal ties to Freemasonry, but that doesn't matter to the Scottish Rite donors. As Darin pointed out, all the scholarship recipients were great students and highly professional.
“They’re philanthropic themselves,” Bernhardt added. “We look at that because it reflects our values.”
Talking to Bernhard and Darin, it’s easy to see how proud these men are of the good work Masons do.
“Masonry is the largest fraternity in the world,” Darin said, adding that Scottish Rite Masons support many philanthropic causes, including hospitals, recovery efforts for victims of catastrophes, and, of course, helping children with learning and language challenges so they can thrive in the classroom and reach their highest potential. In the U.S. some 550,000 men are Scottish Rite Masons, and this branch of Freemasonry has chapters worldwide.
Faculty and staff at the ASU Speech and Hearing Clinic are grateful for this dedicated group’s support, which has made a difference for so many clients as well as College of Health Solutions students.
“It’s been really great to partner with the Scottish Rite team,” Schnick said. “They’re passionate about helping kids with speech and language disorders. It’s so nice to have support from a group that truly shares our values and goals.”
Trio — now ASU alumni — formed online marketplace for people to list, find and book parking spaces
AirGarage, the company born out of parking frustration by three Arizona State University students, just received a $12.5 million infusion of cash from Silicon Valley investors.
Their plans for the money?
Keep building the best possible parking operator in the world.
“How do we keep making ourselves an obvious option for any real estate owners that own parking lots or parking garages to work with us versus sort of the old-school default — competitors of ours?” said co-founder and CEO Jonathon Barkl. “A lot of that entails growing our team and continuing to develop our product and our service to improve it and make sure that it's the best possible option out there for everyone.”
Initial steps will be to grow the sales and engineering teams, and growing them beyond those functions as well.
In 2017 Barkl, Scott Fitsimones and Chelsea Border — all students at ASU, and now alumniBarkl graduated in 2018 with bachelor's degrees in physics and economics; Fitsimones in 2019 with a bachelor's degree in computer science; and Border in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in business data analytics. — became aware of student frustration with parking. Most major universities charge $500 or more a year for parking.
They founded AirGarage, an online marketplace for people to list, find and book parking spaces. For example, a homeowner with enough room in a driveway for an extra car could list that spot, and a driver needing to park in that area could rent it.
Since then, they have expanded to 30 states across the U.S. and Canada and added functions to become a full-service parking operator. They handle operations, advertising, marketing, enforcement, hardware and payment processing.
“For me, it comes down to a lot of being able to create value for folks that need it,” Barkl said. “There's a lot of waste, and there's a lot of backward way of doing things in this industry. Real estate in general and parking specifically, it's this very old-school, offline, mismanaged business. And a lot of that leads to waste in the industry ... for the owners. And it also leads to a terrible experience for consumers. I don't know of anybody that's ever really had a pleasant experience when trying to find a parking spot, whether that be in a downtown urban area or elsewhere. You have to deal with machines and attendants, and the machines are broken and the attendants are grouchy, or they’re collecting cash and you don't have cash on you. It's really just overall a bad experience.”
At ASU, Barkl was a member of the Flinn Foundation scholar program, which covers tuition, fees, housing and meals at one of Arizona’s public universities, plus study abroad. Each year, about 20 top Arizona high school seniors are chosen.
“That was actually how I met Scott, one of the co-founders of Airgarage,” he said. “And so we met through that program, and then that program enabled me to do what I'm doing now because they're funding you through your college experience.”
Freedom from stressing about how to pay tuition and bills and holding down a job while going to school enabled Barkl to think about bigger things he wanted to do with his life, as well as having a great support system from the network of Flinn scholars.
Being a member of Barrett, The Honors College also opened up resources, including exchanging ideas with fellow Barrett students.
The team also participated in Venture Devils, which supports entreprenuers from ASU or from the community, with ASU ties. The program’s goal is to supercharge success by connecting entrepeneurs with mentors who provide ongoing support.
“It gave us a lot of exposure to what does developing customer relationships look like?” Barkl said. “What does someone who has started a business think about day-to-day, and what can we learn from them? So I think that that was all really valuable.”
Though Barkl's science classes as a physics major were time-consuming, he says physics taught him how to think and ask the right questions. He considers all of his time at ASU valuable.
To anyone considering a new business, forget the playing-house phase where you create a brand and logo and business cards and talking to investors, Barkl said. He has this advice:
“How do you as quickly as possible get in front of customers that you don't know that aren't your friends and family, and try to get them to pay you for your service or your product? Getting in front of those customers as quickly as possible is going to get you to that kind of kernel of truth of whether or not your business makes sense or not. Are you creating value for some customer, and are they willing to willing to pay you for it? And really nothing else matters.”
Top image: AirGarage founders co-founders (from left) Scott Fitsimones, Chelsea Border and Jonathon Barkl. Photos courtesy of AirGarage
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Expanded philanthropy during pandemic has lasting impact for clients and speech-language pathology students at ASU clinic - Arizona State University
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