Paulie's Blog: Giving back both on and off the track

A conference call with the people from ChildHelp, a day at the go-kart track, and two days at Watkins Glen highlighted this week. Thanks to a lot of assistance from the NASCAR Foundation, I was finally able to settle on which foundation I wanted to work with to help abused children and begin a dialogue with them.

ChildHelp is a national nonprofit that is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and it is the foundation that I've decided to start working with. In addition to being the largest non-governmental and non-profit organization set up to help abused children, there were a number of other things that attracted me to this organization.

Paulie with Christa Robinson of the YES Network.

The biggest of these reasons was the breadth of the organization. ChildHelp goes beyond providing children with psychological help; as its mission states, they "exist to meet the physical, emotional, educational and spiritual needs of abused, neglected and at-risk children. We focus our efforts on advocacy, prevention, treatment and community outreach." The foundation even has a hotline, 1-800-4-A-CHILD, that abused children can call at any time to ask for help. Rather than give you all the details of what they do now, though, I encourage you to check out their Web site.

I was able to speak to a number of management officials from the foundation about the best ways to work together. For the short term, I'll be visiting a number of their facilities to sign autographs and talk to the residents. Looking toward the next few years, we decided that it would be best to work toward integrating our networks and schedules to try to "plug me in" to their existing programs. For example, one idea that we discussed was bringing residents from their Arizona shelter to the Phoenix race next spring. I can't explain how excited I am!

Last week, I was contacted by the YES Network about doing a short feature on me and my racing career, as they often do pieces on local athletes outside of baseball. However, the network wanted to film me at a race "in the tri-state area within the next two weeks." That, obviously, wasn't going to happen with the Camping World West Series, so I began working on some other options. The end result was probably even more fun than a West race.

The show's host, Christa Robinson, and I went on Thursday to Oakland Valley Raceway Park, a go-kart track that I grew up racing at in New York. After giving Christa some basic racing lessons and letting her take practice laps, she and I raced each other in race-prepared karts and the camera crew got all of it on film. The entire day was a lot of fun. More details about how you can watch the clip will be posted on my Web site in about a few days.

The week wrapped up at Watkins Glen International. I headed up there for the weekend to do appearances and events for Toyota, which had a huge presence at the race. With the track being about four hours from my house in New Jersey, I drove up early on Saturday morning. Believe it or not, I was out of the house before the sun came up (anyone who knows me is probably surprised)!

Paulie wheeled a souped-up Camry for ride-alongs at Watkins Glen.

On Saturday, I was able to spend some time in Toyota's Chalet in the hospitality area at the track. After giving a short speech about my racing career and our relationship with Toyota, I answered questions before an autograph signing.

After that, we headed over to Toyota's "PitPass" display, where I climbed into the bed of a monster truck. This wasn't just any monster truck; it started as a regular, street legal Toyota Tundra. My job was to fire off T-shirts from the truck bed into the crowd before driver's introductions for the Nationwide Series race. Operating the T-shirt "gun" was a blast.

After a few meetings at the track, I headed to dinner with some friends and then back to the hotel.

I was at the track bright and early on Sunday for some ride-alongs. From about 9 to 11 a.m., I drove a heavily modified Toyota Camry. This thing was so fast that it had a complete set of Simpson harnesses! We gave rides to a few children, fans and team members, but our real focus was members of the military. Getting to spend two hours scaring military guys while diving into the Chicane was a blast! If the smiles they gave at the end of the ride are any indication, then they really enjoyed it.

As you know, the race at Watkins Glen was rained out and was run Monday. After trying to wait out the rain for about an hour on Sunday, I jumped in the car and headed home.

Hopefully this week will be as much fun as the last one. We're racing at Colorado National this weekend. The track is located about 40 minutes from NAPA's Western Region Headquarters, so hopefully we can bring home a win.

This week's winner in our giveaway was Peter, who won a pair of my race-used gloves and a signed autograph card. If you haven't entered, be sure to enter now at paulieharraka.com. Have a great week!

Paulie Harraka, a native of Fairlawn, N.J., is a student at Duke University. He is a member of the Drive for Diversity program and races in the Camping World West Series for Bill McAnally Racing. Harraka won the 2008 track championship at All American Speedway.