Donor Spotlight: Sam & Pete Louras P’00 Give to Light the Fire & Pay It Forward

How did philanthropy become an important part of your life? Who modeled it for you?

Sam and I were both raised in families that believed in giving. Sam was raised in a military family. Her father spent his career in the U.S. Army and retired as a colonel.  He believed in giving his life to protecting our country. I was raised in Vermont in a small town that was very important to both my parents. They raised a family, worked hard, and volunteered to help organizations that  were important to them. Our town had a newspaper that had been around since the late 1700s. I remember learning to read the paper, and I’d see my parents’ names in articles or advertisements, mostly related to money they had donated to an organization or an event they were supporting. I’d ask them questions and they would tell me: “It is always important to support organizations you believe in.” So for us it was our parents who created the model of “giving” that we still believe in today.

Why do you continue to support CRMS 25 years after your son graduated?

CRMS had an amazing impact on our son – we always say it was one of the best decisions we ever made as parents trying to help our son be successful in life. I always say that CRMS lit his fire!! And that fire is still burning. He recently got a Doctorate in Psychology and is working at one of the largest Veterans Administration Hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We continue to support CRMS because we believe that if the school had that kind of impact on our son, it can have a similar impact on more and more high school students in the years ahead. We want CRMS to be around for a long time, and helping with the school’s finances and endowment funds will provide the financial security to help the school.

What impacts do you hope to see with your support of Colorado Rocky Mountain School?

We are not educators, so we don’t feel it is our role to help the school with advice on how it operates or how it teaches students. So we see our donations as helping in the financial areas where the school needs endowment funds into perpetuity, construction funds to maintain and modernized buildings and classrooms, and annual fund monies to balance the schools budget each year