Steven Silver partners with NFL legend Ronnie Lott to raise money for Covid-19 relief.
NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott Aligns with Longtime Friend, Silicon Valley Jeweler Stephen Silver to Benefit Eastside College Preparatory School and Eat REAL, New Campaign will Help Impoverished Bay Area Children Through Covid-19
Today on Giving Tuesday Now, Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry pledges up-front personal donation of $10,000 to each charity to kick-off the cash match campaign, designed to help people do good while getting cash back for their pre-owned jewelry
New York | Menlo Park, CA (May 5, 2020) – For decades, Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry has made philanthropy and community involvement a central tenet of their business, but Jared and Stephen Silver wanted to make a more immediate impact to address the significant challenges facing impoverished children and their families due to Covid-19. Working together with longtime friend and ally NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott of the San Francisco 49ers, the Silvers now announce their pledge to donate a 10 percent cash match for every dollar spent buying secondhand jewelry through their remote buying program, directly benefiting Eastside College Preparatory School and Eat REAL. The Silvers have kicked off the program on Giving Tuesday Now with a personal donation of $10,000 to each charity, and their goal is to raise $100,000 for each organization over the next 30 days. Ronnie Lott will help the Silvers drive awareness and engagement with the campaign. The program has the potential to generate thousands if not millions of dollars to help feed, educate, and meet urgent needs for local Bay Area families.
Stephen Silver, CEO of Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry: “This is a devastating time for so many, and the reality is that none of us as individuals can address all of the different needs in people’s lives without the help of others.” For him, partnership with local charities and allies is key, and he believes the best place to start is to help children: “We can make a big impact through this campaign and with our partners to take care of children. We want to feed them, educate them, house them, and address all of the different areas that can affect them. I think that is very important.”
Ronnie Lott, like the Silvers, believes in a team approach to doing good. For years, he has helped raise funds in the community to improve the education, health, and life skills of disadvantaged youth. Life, he explains, “is always being in the huddle, finding a way to touch everybody. I saw an opportunity to huddle with people in the community, with my veteran teammates Stephen Silver and Eastside College Preparatory School, and now this promising rookie, Nora LaTorre, CEO of Eat REAL. We have unity as a team and we’re all trying to figure out how to take this bad situation and turn it into a better situation. I realized this is a moment where I can help.”
Even prior to this pledge, the Silvers’ support of Eat REAL as angel donors had already been transformative, enabling the non-profit to quickly scale from supporting 51 Northern California schools serve nutritious meals to partnering with 1,000 schools statewide. Today these schools serve 1.5 million crisis meals to students from low-income families per week, and through this campaign, they hope to help more schools increase that number even more dramatically. According to Nora LaTorre, CEO, “The generosity of the Silvers has been catalytic. We created a lot of good together, increasing real food access and education to create a healthier generation. In our last campaign, they helped us create a donor match challenge. He [Stephen Silver] not only participated in a donation challenge but also challenged back which helped us attract even more donors and raise more money.”
The Silvers have long supported Eastside College Preparatory School in their quest to educate and provide opportunities for historically underrepresented students, addressing long-term needs with scholarships, employment opportunities, and more. Chris Bischof, Co-Founder and Principal notes that the need now is much more immediate: “We want to support our families going through really difficult times, with solutions that range from remote learning programs to providing technology, meals, and emergency support, all of which require expanded funding and resources that the cash-match remote buying program can facilitate.”
About the Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry Remote Buying Program Cash Match
With its roots in the estate jewelry business, Stephen Silver has long maintained a buying arm to help its clients liquidate their jewelry as needed. Their team of experts can provide free and accurate valuations and historical information for individual pieces or entire collections. With their global network of industry contacts, Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry ensures each evaluation reflects the proper value for each piece of jewelry, timepiece, etc., no matter its age or condition.
They purchase a variety of precious items, including but not limited to jewelry (contemporary, vintage, or antique), loose gemstones, fine watches, and rare and valuable estate pieces like fine silver flatware and hollowware, precious metal coins, and more. They also purchase precious metals of all types, including disused, broken jewelry, scrap gold, silver, and platinum.
To engage with the remote buying program and contribute to the 10 percent cash match, anyone in the Bay Area and beyond can schedule a free video evaluation of their jewelry, pre-owned watches, gems, and other valuables at https://shsilver.com/pages/sell-your-jewelry.
Participants are eligible for same or next-day payment of any offers accepted, and they can be sure that the cash match donations resulting from their jewelry sale will be sent to Eat REAL and Eastside College Preparatory School within the week.
For interview requests with Stephen Silver, Ronnie Lott, Nora LaTorre, and Chris Bischof about their partnership and cash match campaign, please contact info@anamartinspr.com.
About Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry: Stephen Silver is a Silicon-Valley based gemologist, geologist, diamonteer, and philanthropist. Over the course of the last 40 years, Silver has established a reputation amongst his global network of jewelry industry contacts and elite gemstone collectors for his expertise in diamond and color gemstone cutting and jewelry design. Following his geology studies at San Diego State University and earning a Graduate Gemologist degree from GIA, Silver later returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to found an estate jewelry firm specializing in antiques and precious stones. There, he gained access to a number of history’s most important colored gems, including the famous Cullinan Blue Diamond necklace, a historic piece he went on to purchase and donate to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and later, the Pink Promise Diamond, which he recut and improved, resulting in a record price per carat at auction in 2017. Joined in recent years by son and Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry President Jared Silver, Stephen Silver expanded his business into a vertically integrated wholesale manufacture and retail operation of international reach with an office and retail boutique based in and around Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit shsilver.com
Beyond their renown as gemstone, jewelry, and timepiece experts, the Silvers are also recognized in Silicon Valley for their extensive philanthropic work. As lifelong residents of the San Francisco Bay area, they have been both consistent and significant supporters of a number of charities, donating millions to regional organizations that include the Sharks Foundation, the Peninsula Volunteers, Inc., Bizworld.org, Menlo Charity Horse Show, One Mind, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, the V Foundation, and more. The company’s philanthropy program carefully screens potential beneficiaries to ensure that at least 90 percent of the funds they raise benefit their causes, and evaluates each program’s efficacy in combating disease, advancing education, or the arts.
About Eastside College Preparatory School: Eastside College Preparatory School is an independent day and boarding high school in East Palo Alto, California, preparing low-income, first-generation students to attend and succeed in four-year colleges. https://www.eastside.org
About Eat REAL: Eat REAL is dedicated to increasing real food access through K-12 schools, creating a healthier next generation and planet. Eat REAL’s COVID-19 program supports over 1,370 schools across California and the United States. Eat REAL’s core model is a nutrition and sustainability best practices certification and education program for schools to raise the bar and make food in schools more nutritious and sustainable. The organization’s impact is made possible by financial support from Battery Powered, Raley’s Food for Families Foundation, Walmart Foundation, WeWorkForGood, and support from donors through Eat REAL’s COVID-19 response campaign. More information can be found at www.eatreal.org.