Bill Streich

Bill Streich, Chief Financial Officer (retired)
Holt Logistics Corporation

Hello, I'm Bill Streich. I'm a member of the BLOCS executive board of directors responsible for the governance portion of BLOCS right now, which is onboarding new, active, energetic board members for our committee and all the great work we're doing. I've been with seven firms in the Philadelphia area, came in as a financial doctor and parachuted in, made sure everybody was on the same team, and did the best we could to work ourselves out of difficult situations.

So it was about 2006/07 while I was in the middle of that with one of the local firms in the area that I saw an article in the newspaper was a Saturday morning, Philadelphia Inquirer. There was a picture of Michael Young, Brian McElwee, Mike O’neil and the mission schools. They were at St. Mathias. And they listed what their mission was, which was to educate and give everybody a great education. There were plenty of seats. There were great educators. How do we get this moving? So I reached out to Mike O'Neill and told him I was interested, told him I would use my leverage to bring other people, the accounting firms, the law firms, etc. To understand the mission of BLOCS, and so I joined in 2009.

As he always does, Mike assigned positions; I was assigned as director of development. We did about 30 presentations to the major accounting firms, the mid-level accounting firms, the law firms, the banks, and all the major and mid-level firms in the Philadelphia area to get our message out on the LLCs of BLOCS that there was EITC money out there, very few people understood it. And we would start the meeting by saying we're not here to take money out of your pockets or ask you for a direct contribution. We're here to show you a better way to spend your state income taxes, which are going to Harrisburg.

And here, if you contribute to BLOCS you can designate your school, your alum school, your son's school, your daughter's school, or just to BLOCS in general, into the mission schools in general. And we will work with you on that and get the money to where it's needed the most to the 1000s of qualified kids. So it's not an us versus them public versus parochial. We're not trying to convert people. We're trying to give the students a better opportunity and place for their school. We have a great team and staff, but more importantly, we have a great mission. So thank you all very much for listening. And it's been great to catch up with everybody. Take care

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