Community Outreach and Charitable Activities

Mile High Karate’s community outreach runs in five lines of work: free and low-cost programs in Colorado schools, fundraising for Chuck Norris’s Kick Drugs Out of America (now Kickstart Kids), sponsorship of Project Concern International’s Walk for Children, named single-event fundraisers, and inclusion and safety outreach. This page sets out what the record actually shows, dates the items that can be dated, and marks the difference between what an outside source documents and what Mile High Karate says about itself.

How this page is sourced

Four kinds of evidence sit behind the items below, and they are not equal. Where an independent publication was read directly — a magazine scan, a third-party article — the page says so and names it. Where the source is a flyer, ad or handout from the period, the page says that too: a contemporaneous document from the organization itself is good evidence that something was offered, and weaker evidence about scale. Where the only source is Mile High Karate’s current site, a welcome booklet or a first-person article by Stephen Oliver, the claim is attributed to Mile High Karate rather than stated flatly.

Fundraising and free programs for public and private schools

The longest-running strand of the outreach is also the least dramatic: instructors going into elementary schools, teaching conflict avoidance and bully prevention for nothing, and structuring the paid after-school classes so the fees went to the school instead of to Mile High Karate.

Free presentations, 1995 onward

A 1995 Mile High Karate handout offered schools three presentations — The A-B-C’s of Conflict Avoidance, How to Deal With Bullies and Practical Self Defense — marked “No Charge — Purely as a Community Service.” The handout describes one-day and three-day formats, usually for groups of twenty or more, with four- to six-week after-school programs available “at a nominal fee.” The same sheet carries a Chuck Norris / Kick Drugs Out of America notice marked “©EFC Copyright 1995,” which dates it.

How the after-school programs were structured

Stephen Oliver’s letter to Colorado educators sets out the mechanics. According to that letter, Mile High Karate:

1. donated 30 to 40 staff hours a month to area schools;
2. supplied roughly $50 per student in materials and uniforms;
3. made the $20-per-student after-school fee payable to the school, with “100% of the fee is retained for your school”;
4. added character education, career days, carnival booths and teacher training on request.

That fourth point is why the recurring “over $100,000 a year for area elementary schools” figure should be read carefully. Mile High Karate’s 1999 and 2007 materials say staff “volunteered in hundreds of area schools” while “raising well over $100,000.00 annually for local elementary schools,” and the educators’ letter says “each year we teach over 30,000 area children and raise over $100,000.00 for area elementary schools.” The mechanism those same documents describe is parent-paid program fees passed through to the schools — real money arriving at the school, but not a cash donation from the martial arts business. The publications never say this outright; the distinction is drawn here because the documents describe the pass-through and because the two numbers do not reconcile in one year that was counted: a January 2004 announcement reports the Secrets of the Last Samurai school program reaching 19,732 Colorado elementary students in 2003, well short of “over 30,000 per year.”

It is also worth saying plainly that the school programs doubled as the school’s marketing. The 1995 free-presentation handout sits on the page next to a “Stephen Oliver’s Mile High Karate” advertisement listing location phone numbers. Thirty years of free instruction in public schools is not made less real by that, but outreach that also fed enrollment is a different thing from a donation, and this page does not blur them.

Thornton: enrichment with funds returned to the schools

Amanda and Stephen Christensen have run before- and after-school enrichment programs in the Jefferson, Adams and Brighton districts since 2003, which Mile High Karate describes as operating “with funds raised returned to the schools.” This comes from the school’s own pages; no district document confirming amounts has been located. See the Mile High Karate history for the wider timeline.

Project Concern International: the Denver Area Walk for Children

On Saturday, June 6, 1992, Mile High Karate sponsored and hosted the 2nd Annual Denver Area Walk for Children, a 10K walk benefiting Project Concern International, the San Diego–based international health and development charity.

The event flyer, held in the school’s archive, carries the line “Sponsored by Stephen Oliver’s Mile High Karate.” The start and finish were at the Mile High Karate school on the southeast corner of Arapahoe and University. Sponsor sheets were distributed through the Aurora, Englewood, Lakewood and Westminster schools, which put the walk in front of several thousand families in a single spring.

This is the clearest surviving example of the pattern that runs through the whole record: the school did not simply write a check, it turned its locations and its student families into the event’s logistics. The flyer documents the sponsorship and the date. It does not record how much the walk raised, and no Project Concern International figure for the 1992 Denver walk has been located.

Kickstart Kids, formerly Kick Drugs Out of America

Chuck Norris founded Kick Drugs Out of America in 1990; the program has been called Kickstart Kids since 2003. It puts character-development martial arts instruction into Texas public schools as a credit-bearing class. Mile High Karate’s fundraising for it is the best-documented charitable activity in this history, and the one place where an independent publication confirms a dollar figure.

The documented record, 1995–1997

Chuck Norris’s own newsletter, T.E.A.M. News, reported in its December 1997 issue that at the Educational Funding Company convention in Orlando on November 22–23, 1997, EFC chairman Nick Cokinos presented Norris with a check for $130,972 for Kick Drugs Out of America. The same item thanks “Steven Oliver, who contributed $15,000!” That is a third-party contemporaneous publication naming the amount, and it is the anchor for everything else on this page.

Two things about it are worth stating rather than smoothing over. The newsletter credits Oliver personally and does not name Mile High Karate. And the newsletter’s own arithmetic corrects Oliver’s recollection: he has written that he remembered his schools supplying 15 to 20 percent of the total, while $15,000 is closer to 11 percent of $130,972 — “I’ll trust the paper over my memory.”

The Norris letters

Two signed letters on Kick Drugs Out of America letterhead, both addressed to Stephen C. Oliver at Mile High Karate in Littleton, Colorado, bracket the fundraising years.

The 1995 letter also credits Oliver and his colleague Scott with proposing that KDOOA recruit regional people “to help us find instructors, continue with the fundraising effort, and help with the ‘adopt-a-school’ program,” and it names Nick Cokinos as the EFC side of the partnership Norris hoped to build.

The 1997 letter adds a measure of what the money bought. Norris writes that the program then had 3,000 kids enrolled — “we have come a long way in just under six years and it’s been possible only because of the help from friends like you” — and closes, “I can see why Nick has you on the EFC Board.”

What Mile High Karate’s own materials add

From the school’s pages and Oliver’s first-person articles, attributed as such:

• May 1991 — a Mile High Karate advertisement ran alongside Chuck Norris’s endorsement of Kick Drugs Out of America.
• November 29, 1996 — a Norris letter thanks Oliver for raising $18,267.
• December 1997 — the prize for the year’s top fundraiser, which Oliver had proposed himself, was a role on Walker, Texas Ranger, in the episode “Undercover,” which aired March 7, 1998.
• Late 1990s — Oliver describes designing the incentives other schools fundraised for: signed and numbered Norris black belts for schools raising more than $500, and co-branded Norris advertising at a higher threshold.

Mile High Karate’s pages also say it raised “over $50,000” for Kick Drugs Out of America and was “partially responsible for over $500,000” raised through EFC. Those are the school’s figures; no independent record of either has been found, and they are not treated here as established.

Two points of clarification that this page deliberately does not get wrong. First, some older Mile High Karate pages describe the school as “the #1 contributing school” to the program. What the documents support is narrower: the December 1997 letter says Oliver “contributed the most this year,” for that one year. Second, because Kick Drugs Out of America did not exist until 1990, the “since 1983” language in Mile High Karate’s materials refers to community outreach generally and cannot refer to this program.

Chuck Norris also visited the Arvada school during his national tour for Sidekicks (1992), after which, by Oliver’s account, he trained with Norris in Texas and coordinated Norris’s work with EFC.

Named single events

• June 6, 1992 — Project Concern International Walk for Children. Sponsored and hosted by Mile High Karate; see above.
• August 16, 2002 — “Kicking for a Cause.” A kick-a-thon for Colorado fire relief, listed on Mile High Karate’s press page. No amount, venue or publication is recorded. The date is consistent with the June 2002 Hayman Fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado history at the time, but no source names which fire the event supported, so this page does not assert it.
• September 2006 — wish-granting in Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune ran “Wish is granted thanks to a karate crusade” and “Ailing Sandy girl to get her Disney wish,” and the October 2006 Valley Journals ran “Mile High students help a young girl’s dream.” These headlines are listed in the school’s archive; the full texts sit behind the Tribune’s paid archive and have not been read.
• September 2006 — Children’s Hospital demonstration, Dunkirk, Maryland. The newly franchised Dunkirk school, formerly Tracy’s Karate, raised more than $500 for Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. All nineteen children, ages 3 to 16, performed board breaks, weapons forms and empty-hand forms in front of more than a hundred spectators. Instructor Doug Mooney is quoted in The Recorder’s coverage, reproduced in the school’s archive. The archive dates the story September 2006; the reproduced page reads October 2006.
• August 2006 — airline-passenger self-defense. The Rocky Mountain News covered anti-air-terror self-defense classes, per the archive listing.

Inclusion and safety outreach

Two independently published 2006 features by Karen Eden document outreach that was not fundraising at all.

A free women’s self-defense class, spring 2006

In Black Belt (November 2006, “A Symbol of Hope”), Eden reports that within days of 14-year-old brown belt Brittney Richardson fighting off an attacker in Denver, instructor Amanda Christensen organized a free women’s self-defense class at her school. Mile High Karate’s own archive lists this article as June 2006; the scanned page footer reads November 2006, page 64, and the later date is used here.

Students with disabilities

In Tae Kwon Do Times (July 2006), Eden profiles Jake Maloney, a Mile High Karate student with cerebral palsy preparing for black belt. In that article Oliver says training students with disabilities “is commonplace at his seven Denver area schools,” naming students with cystic fibrosis, autism, cancer, deafness and ADD/ADHD, and students who use wheelchairs. The article is independently published; the breadth of that claim is Oliver’s own account within it. The current expression of this work is the school’s Black Belt community service project requirement, under which every candidate for first degree Black Belt completes and presents a service project before the Black Belt Pre-Test.

Charity work by franchise and affiliate schools

Individual owners ran their own programs, and Mile High Karate’s pages credit them rather than absorbing the work into the parent organization:

• Brian Howard (Kentucky and Illinois, later the Orange City, Florida affiliate) has held annual fundraisers since 2003 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Tara’s Angels, the Paducah Rape Crisis Center and Toys for Tots. In 2004 he petitioned the governors of Illinois and Kentucky to declare October 16 National Martial Arts Day.
• Amanda and Stephen Christensen (Thornton) run the district enrichment programs described above.
• Tauranga, New Zealand — a third-party youth-services directory lists the school as offering programs to support young people affected by bullying.

Mile High Karate’s 2007 welcome booklet also says the organization “actively supports The Children’s Hospital Foundation,” and other pages refer to Educational Foundation Outreach and a “Fostering Leadership” program. No amounts, years or program details have been located for any of the three.

Questions

How long has Mile High Karate done community outreach?

Mile High Karate’s own materials, going back at least to the January 2007 welcome booklet, describe Stephen Oliver, his staff and his students as active in charitable activities and community outreach since 1983. The earliest item with an independent or contemporaneous document behind it is the June 6, 1992 Project Concern International Walk for Children.

What did Mile High Karate raise for Chuck Norris’s Kick Drugs Out of America?

Chuck Norris’s T.E.A.M. News of December 1997 reported a $130,972 check presented to Kick Drugs Out of America at the Educational Funding Company convention in Orlando on November 22–23, 1997, and thanked “Steven Oliver, who contributed $15,000.” A Norris letter of November 29, 1996 credits Oliver with raising $18,267 that year.

Is Kickstart Kids the same thing as Kick Drugs Out of America?

Yes. Chuck Norris founded the program as Kick Drugs Out of America in 1990, and it has been known as Kickstart Kids since 2003. It places character-development martial arts instruction in Texas public schools as a for-credit class.

What did Mile High Karate do for Project Concern International?

It sponsored and hosted the 2nd Annual Denver Area Walk for Children, a 10K held June 6, 1992, with start and finish at the Mile High Karate school at Arapahoe and University and sponsor sheets distributed through the Aurora, Englewood, Lakewood and Westminster schools.

Did schools pay for Mile High Karate’s programs?

A 1995 handout offered in-school presentations at “No Charge — Purely as a Community Service.” For the paid after-school programs, Oliver’s letter to educators states that the $20-per-student fee was made payable to the school and that “100% of the fee is retained for your school,” alongside roughly $50 per student in donated materials and 30 to 40 donated staff hours a month.

Is a community service project required for Black Belt?

Yes. A community service project is required to receive a first degree Black Belt at Mile High Karate and must be completed before the Black Belt Pre-Test. Seventy-six candidates’ project presentations are published on the Black Belt community service projects page.

Last reviewed October 19, 2026.