Remembering the NC woman who made Christmas possible for thousands of Charlotte kids
Brent Sanders was hanging out with a buddy in downtown Charlotte on a Friday night right before Christmas in 1989 when the rest of his life flashed before his eyes.
They were at Fat Tuesday’s in the CityFair retail center, and Sanders — then a young executive at a healthcare technology company — spotted a 6-foot-tall blonde distributing flyers, he would soon learn, for a charity fundraiser for something called the Shelter Medical Clinic for the Homeless.
“I went over to get a drink from the bar and came back and she jumped in my seat, so I sat on her — unintentionally,” Sanders recalls. “She goes, ‘Hi! You’re cute. My name’s Sharon. I wanted to meet you.’ We talked for an hour and had an amazing introduction. Then she goes, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ ... And I’m thinking this beautiful blonde wants to go out with me. So I said, ‘I’m available.’ And she goes, ‘Great! I’m delivering gifts to hundreds of kids around the county. You would be an awesome gift-delivery guy.’”
“I should have known then what I was getting into,” he says, laughing. “But I didn’t.”
He helped out the next day. They started dating about a month later. In September 1991, they were married.
And over the next three decades, countless others would be won over by the appeal of Sharon Sanders, who marshaled armies of soft-hearted volunteers — most famously as founder of Kids First of the Carolinas but also in myriad other capacities — while seeming to have a boundless enthusiasm for helping those in need.
Sharon Sanders of Weddington died at home last Thursday morning, just 3-1/2 weeks after learning she had liver cancer, and having told very few people about her disease. She was 65.
In addition to her husband Brent, Sanders leaves behind their 26-year-old son Hayden, their 23-year-old daughter Hailey, and a simple but powerful legacy:
“If Sharon Sanders was on your side and wanted to help you,” says longtime friend Kat Owen of Charlotte, “then you knew you were gonna be OK.”
Going above and beyond
To some extent, Sanders was bred for this.
Born Aug. 9, 1955, and raised in the northern Indiana town of Griffith, on the outskirts of Chicago, Sanders had a mother who would enlist her help to deliver food and provisions to homeless people living on the railroad cars that would stop at the train station near their house.
It took awhile for that seed to take root, and she followed a fairly traditional career path in early adulthood, earning an associate’s degree in business from Chicago Community College.
But in December 1987 — just over two years after moving from Chicago to Charlotte to manage the private-duty nursing department of Presbyterian Hospital — she helped lead the opening the Shelter Medical Clinic for the Homeless, which was staffed by volunteer physicians to provide free, non-emergency medical care to people living on the streets.
From the start, as its volunteer coordinator, Sanders went above and beyond.
She almost immediately came up with a plan to solicit donations of gifts that could be delivered at Christmastime to children who had been seen at the clinic (the effort that she had roped her future husband into). And in January 1989, she coordinated a fundraiser for the clinic called Charlotte’s Largest Office Party, which would become a legendary annual social gathering in Charlotte.
In its first two years, the Shelter Medical Clinic for the Homeless provided care for more than 1,300 men, women and children, and in 1989, Sanders won the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service.
Over time, though, Sanders’ interest in the adult-oriented bash waned while her passion for giving gifts to kids at Christmas grew with the idea, which had evolved into a holiday-themed party for children and families in need, complete with a holiday dinner and gifts and clothing for the kids.
Then a chance meeting with a well-known radio personality took it to the next level.
‘Never gonna let you go’
John Hancock was dealing with a bit of a crisis on that weekday afternoon back in the early ’90s.
At the time, he was host of a music and talk show for Charlotte’s WBT-AM (1110), one of the oldest and most powerful radio stations in the country, and a schoolteacher in Statesville had called him out of the blue to ask for his help with three young students who appeared to have been abandoned by their mother.
He offered to drive up and see what he could do to help. But he never made it. Because as he was explaining the situation to the receptionist in the lobby, a 6-foot-tall woman with blond hair who had been waiting came over and started asking questions.
“Within 45 minutes,” Hancock recalls, “that woman had clothes for them to wear, and food for them to eat, and a safe place for them to be in Statesville until we or agencies or whatever could figure out what to do.”
That woman was Sharon Sanders.
Sanders told him about her annual Christmas party for kids, which by then had grown to serving roughly 50 out of Sharon Presbyterian Church in Charlotte. Eventually, she told him she’d invited the three young children from Statesville to it. And eventually, she asked Hancock if he wanted to come.
“So I went that year,” he says, “and she had the place all decorated up like a Christmas workshop and donated food that she’d gotten from restaurants. It was a real party for these kids, and then at the end of it, they went over to these rooms and picked up a bag with their names on it filled with presents. It sucked me right in.
“And if you get in Sharon’s grip, she’s never gonna let you go.”
Soon after, Shelter Medical Clinic for the Homeless became a Mecklenburg County program, at which point Sanders founded Kids First of the Carolinas. The Christmas party would become Kids First’s flagship event, and Hancock would become its most high-profile backer.
The following year — and each year up to and including 2019, when he retired — he went on the air to ask listeners to donate to Kids First. Thanks in large part to his support, Kids First was eventually able to provide for more than 2,000 children every Christmas and raised about $80,000 a year.
Before his involvement, the organization was raising just a few thousand dollars annually.
But Hancock probably owed Sanders as much thanks as she owed him.
“One of the great things about my reputation here in town is how community-oriented I am, or have been,” Hancock says. “But I never would have gotten that reputation if it hadn’t been for Kids First. ... So an awful lot of what I get credit for — ‘what a great community guy he is’ — Sharon actually owns that plaque.”
“Listen, I’m the son of an Episcopal priest — I’ve been around a lot of good people in my life,” he continues. “And I’ve never met anybody that cared more about finding and doing for other people than Sharon.”
Everything was a big deal
She was known for doing things big.
In 1994, in Washington, D.C., she rubbed shoulders with actor Paul Newman while receiving a Jefferson Award from the American Institute for Public Service.
In 1995, she attracted news headlines to a friend who was dying of cancer by getting them front-row seats to Mother Teresa’s visit to the Charlotte Coliseum and paving the way for them to become one of just a handful of people to have a personal interaction with the nun.
In 1996, she was nominated to become one of 41 area “community heroes” to carry the Olympic torch as it passed through Charlotte on its way to Atlanta for the Summer Games.
Yet she also loved to do the little things. Like volunteering at her kids’ schools — Weddington Elementary, Middle and High — or for their sports teams, or for community organizations in Weddington. Or even if it was just something she could do to make her kids’ lives brighter, or a tiny bit easier.
“A really good early memory I have of her,” says her son Hayden, now a sales executive at Honeywell in Charlotte, “is in pre-K she pulled me out of class one day, early — this was at the height of the Pokemon craze — to give me a Charizard card. I thought she was the coolest mom ever for doing that. ... When I was a toddler, that made me a celebrity.”
Her daughter Hailey, who is in graduate school in Tennessee, says she loved that her mother always tried to make the little things feel bigger. As an example, “I’d be sitting on the couch with my mom, for the two minutes a day that she might have sat down, and I would say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna get a water. Do you want anything?’ She’d be like, ‘No, I’ll get it,’ and she’d jump up and run to the fridge and get us waters — and she’d put lemon in the water just to make it better.”
It was emblematic, Hailey says, of how her mother lived her whole life. “She would volunteer herself to do these things for us, and would do more than you would have even asked her to do in the first place.”
But there was one thing in Sharon Sanders’ life that she didn’t want to make a big deal out of: cancer.
‘Didn’t miss a beat’
In fact, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2017, she told almost no one outside of her immediate family and a few very close friends.
“Her whole focus,” Brent Sanders says, “was to get through the treatment, to get through chemo, to get through the surgery, to get through everything, so she could do Kids First of the Carolinas Christmas that year. So she went through all of that, got done with chemo in December the week of the Christmas party, and went to the Christmas party. Didn’t miss a beat.”
Sharon stayed seemingly in perfectly healthy for the next three years. But last month, she started experiencing some discomfort in her stomach that quickly got worse.
On Dec. 21, a few hours after walking five miles with Hailey, Sanders was admitted to the hospital and informed that the cancer was back, this time in her liver.
A few nights later, on Christmas Eve, Brent says, “we’re sitting there in the room, she’s lying in the bed. She’s weak. And her phone’s buzzing like crazy — like it does 24 hours a day. She goes, ‘Give my phone.’ So I gave her the phone. She looks at it. She smiles. She says, ‘Great!’ I go, ‘What’s great?’ She says, ‘A thousand!’ I go, ‘A thousand what?’ She goes, ‘We just helped out thousandth family this year for Christmas.’”
During a pandemic. With much of Kids First’s operations and fundraising efforts suspended.
Sharon was discharged that night, and spent Christmas at home with her family. Her health worsened rapidly, but still she kept it mostly quiet.
“She’s an interesting personality, in that for someone so out there and open and giving and in front of the world, she’s private,” Brent says. “And she’s prideful, and she’s tough, and she doesn’t want people to worry about her. ... I told her, ‘You could get great comfort from people, love and care, while you’re going through this battle.’ But she didn’t want them doing that.”
Brent says Sharon passed away peacefully in her sleep Thursday morning, following a night spent wrapped in the arms of her husband and children.
What made her tick?
Asked where Sharon must have gotten her drive to help others, Brent points first to her upbringing, and those deliveries she made with her mom to the homeless people at the train station in Indiana.
Longtime family friend Al Nedrich, who is Hailey’s godfather and who has overseen the food services for Kids First since its inception, offers up that as a possibility, too, but adds: “Brent’s a very successful businessman in the medical industry, and I think that created blessings for them that I think that Sharon continued to recognize. She was always grateful, I think, in that way. And that gratefulness of her life was reflected back in her willingness to want to give to others.
“I use a quote that I think is very applicable to Sharon: To those that much is given, much is expected.”
But Sharon herself had a much more straightforward explanation.
In 1994, she was in Washington, D.C., for the Jefferson Awards ceremony, sitting at a table with — among others — associate Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, CBS News journalist Lesley Stahl, Paul Newman and North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.
At one point, Helms turned to her and said, “Sharon, what’s your motivation? Why are you so obsessed with doing so much to help so many others?”
She paused for only a second. Then she smiled and offered this simple reply:
“Why wouldn’t I?”
This story was originally published January 20, 2021 at 3:24 PM.
