By ANASTASIA BUSIEK
B ow ties are formal. Quirky. Maybe even fussy.
But to Nathan Ledesma (BBA ’09), Austin Morris (BBA ’10), Mike Sullivan (BS ’08), and Derek Varona (BA ’07, MSA ’08), there’s more to bow ties than meets the eye. The four friends, all different class years, met through the Sigma Pi fraternity at Loyola. After graduation, Ledesma, Morris, and Varona went to work for Deloitte in Chi- cago. Sullivan enrolled in law school at John Marshall. Morris and Ledesma started wearing bow ties at work on Fridays, on a whim.
“I thought, I’m going to be a tax ac-
countant. I have to do something cool,” says Morris. “So I started wearing a bow tie.” Meanwhile, the four Loyola grads had
been looking for a way to get involved in community service. “We volunteered through the fraternity in college, and we’d all gone to Catholic high school,” says Mor- ris. “We all had the common desire to do something like that after college.” Wondering if there was a way to align
their fashion statement—that is, bow ties— with their itch to get involved, they turned to the only place one might find such a seemingly improbable marriage: the Inter- net. That’s where they first stumbled across BowTie Cause, an organization started by former NFL linebacker Dhani Jones that produces bow ties to promote awareness of a variety of causes. Ledesma sent an e-mail indicating that he and his friends were inter- ested in learning more and getting involved. Meanwhile, Sullivan did his own research.
“I had been talking with Nathan about this, so I looked it up, and I found that they had only done one or two ties,” he says. “It turned out that their first bow tie was for juvenile diabetes research—which my sister has. I thought, ‘This is amazing. And a very strange coincidence.’” Sullivan contacted one of the coordi-
nators of the juvenile diabetes research foundation gala in Cincinnati, at which Dhani Jones had introduced the bow tie. The coordinator sent some of the bow ties to Sullivan, and the four friends wore them to the Chicago juvenile diabetes gala. They then posted pictures of themselves at the event on Twitter. That got the attention of Chad Williamson, the CEO of BowTie Cause who started the organization with Jones. “It was sort of crazy the way it started,”
says Williamson. “I saw this Tweet of a picture of all of them at the Chicago Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation gala wearing the bow tie we’d done for Cincinnati.
CONTINUES ON PAGE 17 SOME OF THE CAUSES PABLOVE ALZHEIMER’S ASSOCIATION
RONALD McDONALD HOUSE
ZOOFARI
SPRING 2012
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