Great Range Capital’s Larry Flanagan honored as Idealist of the Year

Ideally, we’d be attending the City Year Idealist Gala tonight to show our support for a worthy program and to publicly honor a member of the Great Range Capital team. As these are not ideal times, however, the in-person event has been cancelled. Luckily, idealists specialize in making lemonade out of lemons.

City Year Kansas City

City Year Kansas City is an AmeriCorps program that supports 66 full-time mentors and tutors serving more than 4,000 public school students. Believing that education is power, the organization’s ultimate goal is to increase the city’s graduation rate, which currently sits at around 70 percent. According to City Year, it takes an idealist–someone who acts on the belief that they have the passion, skills and courage to change the world–to tackle such a monumental task.

The City Year Idealist Gala serves as both a fundraiser and an opportunity to pause and celebrate the work of its students and AmeriCorps members. As a sponsor of this event, we were able to choose a Great Range Capital team member who embodies City Year’s spirit of service and volunteerism to be honored as an Idealist of the Year. This year, we’ve chosen Larry Flanagan.

Idealist of the Year: Larry Flanagan

Idealism is often judged as being unrealistic, and indeed, Larry’s community involvement seems to defy space and time. In addition to working full-time as an associate with Great Range Capital, he serves as an officer in the New York Army National Guard. As Commander of the 4th Financial Management Support Detachment, part of Larry’s duties include planning and executing all reserve training and operations for his unit, which is currently providing assistance to those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in New York.

More locally, Larry regularly volunteers with Harvesters, a community food network, and is a member of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association. A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Business, he continues to mentor current students, assisting with their educational, professional and personal development, and is an active member of the KU Veterans Alumni Network. Recently, Larry’s love of engaging with other professionals and dissatisfaction with costly, invitation-only, agenda-driven networking events inspired him to help start a new networking group that’s free and open to anyone. While the group’s goal of connecting people in the community may be simple, its scale isn’t. Around 700 people were invited to its latest event.

Day of Idealism

As to the “lemonade” mentioned earlier, City Year Kansas City has transformed the cancelled gala into a virtual Day of Idealism. All throughout today it will be honoring students, mentors and fellow community idealists (Larry included) via its website and social media accounts (@CityYearKC on both Twitter and Instagram). We are proud to be able to support City Year Kansas City’s work in our community and to have an idealist like Larry on our team. And while we hate missing the gala, a full-day online celebration seems pretty ideal for now.