IndyCar Benevolent Foundation goes live
It was called CARA, the Championship Auto Racing Auxiliary in the 1980s and ’90s, and its successor, the IFF, the Indy Family Foundation, served as charitable organizations designed to assist members of the IndyCar paddock in times of urgent financial needs. If a crew member had medical expenses they couldn’t cover, funds are drawn to help, or in the case of losing a loved one, help with funeral costs has been provided. Outpouring of dollars to help get someone’s daily driver repaired, or recover from a natural disaster, or a fire, or whatever else might be needed among the hundreds of people who make the NTT IndyCar Series function is where the charity focuses its emergency relief efforts.
It’s recently undergone a number of changes, starting with Heather Carpenter, the wife of team owner/driver Ed Carpenter and longtime steward of the IFF, who needed to step back from running the program due to increasing demands on her time. In her place, Beth Boles, Liz Power and others within paddock have united to carry the initiative forward in a relaunch ahead of the holidays.
Renamed the IndyCar Benevolent Foundation, a new website and online donation platform (https://indycarbenevolentfoundation.org/) has been established by the independent 501(c)(3) group. Along with Boles, an Indianapolis-area businesswomen and mother of IndyCar driver Conor Daly, and Power, a PR veteran whose husband Will is a two-time IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner, the IBF’s new board of directors also includes Kirk Gillette, Laura Hedrick, Heidi Massey-Bong, Denise Titus and Ryann Weatherford.
Boles and the board have made recent outreaches to IndyCar teams in seeking donations and hopes to bring greater awareness — to fans and community members alike — to the IBF.
“Heather did such an amazing job with the foundation, and we’re proud to continue everything that has been done to help the IndyCar family,” Boles told RACER. “I’m very passionate about mechanics — probably because they take care of my kid’s car — and their needs. What the foundation has been doing for a long time, is being there for them, or drivers, or PR people, or whoever it is, in any position, really, to take care of them when they need help.
“Things happen all the time that you never hear about; somebody came up to me at a race in California and said he’d just learned his son had died and didn’t even have the money to get a plane flight back, and that’s the type of thing this organization is here to support. There’s a vetting process, of course, but we’re here to help everyone in IndyCar in their time of need, to the best of our ability.”
In many cases, teams offer full-time employment and a range of benefits to their staff, but there’s also a significant number of independent contractors, or part-time staff, who lack the health care coverage or sizable income to handle whatever emergencies that might befall them or their loved ones. Through CARA, then the IFF and now the IBF, donations from inside and out of IndyCar empower the organization to act like a safety net.
For Power, who worked in IndyCar for many years, it’s the people across all of the teams and those who support it in other ways, from volunteers to media to hospitality, that are meant to come under the IBF’s care.
“To me, it goes to the unsung heroes, the ones that you don’t see, and any hardships that they might be facing,” she said. “This organization is there to help them, and even drivers too, because some of these young guys don’t have everything in place. So it goes to whatever need it may be, and there’s a cap for it, but whatever their hardship might be, we’re there to help in any way that we can, whether it be monetarily or recommendations for health or services. Whatever we can do to help, we try to get them pointed in the right direction.”
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