Washington Commanders left tackle Charles Leno, Jr., and his wife, Jennifer, sat down with Special Olympics Virginia for 30 minutes to shed light on their non-profit organization, Beyond the Entertainer, and their community service initiative, Leno Claus. Throughout the interview, their enthusiasm and desire to give back to the community was evident. Here are excerpts:
SOVA: What is Beyond the Entertainer?
Charles Leno, Jr.: Beyond the Entertainer is the organization me and my wife founded. It’s kind of self-explanatory in the title. You have to think beyond the athlete on the field. We’re more than that. People look at us like, ‘Oh, that’s just Charles Leno, Jr. He plays football. He’s just a left tackle.’ No, I’m way more than that. I am a husband. I’m a father. I’m a brother. I’m a son. I’m a philanthropist. I’m a businessman. I’m so many different things.
Jennifer Leno: We wanted to show all of the components behind him that help him become that person that you may see on the field. So that’s why today we have individuals (from Special Olympics) meeting with strength staff and with coaches and nutritionists. There are so many positions that go into helping him be the person that he is. He couldn’t go out on Sundays if he didn’t have all of those people.”
SOVA: How did you decide to start doing this? When was that? Was there a particular inspiration for it?
Jennifer: Once I got out of college, I started working for the Chicago Bulls and actually had a bucket list item to start a non-profit. So I shared that with him, and he wanted to do the same thing. We talked about it, I want to say, in about 2016. I ended up going back to school. I got my Master’s in non-profit management. We started our own organization, and then COVID hit, and kind of put a halt on a lot of things. But that year is when we got to start Leno Claus.
Charles: Leno Claus is our 25-day countdown initiative that we do around holiday season, December 1 to December 25. When our first daughter was born, I remember sitting on a couch, we were watching Disney Channel or something like that, I’m feeding her a bottle, and they have a 25-day countdown to Christmas. I’m like, ‘Jen, you know what would be a great idea is if we did a 25-day countdown and worked with different organizations or worked with different families or something like that. So we ended up doing it that first year. And then I got cut from Chicago, and we moved out here to the D.C. area. We didn’t have the relationships that we built in Chicago over seven years, so within that first year there was a lot of scrambling, trying to figure out who we were going to work with. So we let the community decide. We put it on our social media – nominate different organizations that we should work with for the first 20 days, and the public decided that. And in the last five days, we go through all the emails, people sending in nominations for different families, so we chose five families last year. This year, we chose five families, but our team actually stepped up big-time, all different members on the team, staff members, players, coaches, a lot of people stepped up and they actually donated to help fund more families, so we were able to do 14 families this year.
Jennifer: Between the nominations for non-profits and the nominations for families, we had over 1,500 submissions this year. And we go through those individually. We hand-picked all of them.
SOVA: Can you list some of the noteworthy organizations you helped and supported within your community?
Charles: Special Olympics is up there. I’m so happy to work with Special Olympics. I was the ambassador while I was in Chicago for the Special Olympics, so that means a lot to me. Ronald McDonald House, Peace for D.C., Foster the Family, Empowered Moms, Feed the Fridge, the HogFarmers, Bridge Reach – there’s a lot that we’ve been doing. It’s a range of shelter houses, patients who are suffering from terminal cancer, non-violence. It’s a wide range, and the reason why we want to make it a wide range is because that’s our world. That’s the world we live in. The word that we always use is awareness. Awareness is key for us – making sure people are aware that they have these different resources out there.
SOVA: What about the future? Where do you see this program going?
Charles: I see this being something bigger. I also see it being integrated in schools and things like that.
Jennifer: In 2023, we have plans for the mentorship program finally getting up and rolling. We were kind of excited that you guys were coming today, because this is a little like dipping our toes in the water. This is kind of what we want to do, but on a very big, much larger scale.
SOVA: What should we take away from our visit today?
Charles: People only see us on Sundays. They are all hyped up about Sundays. But you are seeing that daily prep of what we do to get us to Sundays, in all aspects – the health aspect, the field aspect, the strength aspect, all different aspects. You’re seeing the whole wide picture of what we do for Sundays, and I hope that gives you an idea that these guys are not just football players. We are a lot more than just the football players.
SOVA: Do you think that you’ll have a continuing relationship with Special Olympics?
Jennifer: We’ve worked with Special Olympics so long, they’re just part of us. In Chicago, any player that wanted to be involved with a non-profit had the opportunity at the beginning of the season to purchase X amount of tickets for the whole year to bring out individuals from that organization. So Charles’ organization was Special Olympics. They actually were called ‘Leno’s Juniors,’ because he’s Leno, Jr. So hopefully, we can get that program started here eventually.
SOVA: You guys met in Chicago back when Charles was a player for the Chicago Bears. Jennifer, are you still a Bears fan?
Charles: You want me to answer that for you? She is still a die-hard Chicago Bears fan.
