Blair Hornstine, Co-Founder and President of MAGIC
Blair Hornstine is a native of Moorestown, New Jersey. She founded MAGIC at the age of 9 years old, as a way to give back to those less fortunate in her community. Together with her older brother Adam (then 14) the Hornstine children recruited friends and family to join MAGIC and help them serve the community through fund raising and physical work.
As President of MAGIC, Blair Hornstine has received many awards, accolades and honors. She was the recipient of the President’s Volunteer Award in 2001. In September 1999 and 2000, she received grants from Wal-Mart to use towards MAGIC projects. She received yet another grant from MTV’s charitable award program, Do Something in August of 2000, and the Sears and Levi Youth Empowerment Grant to fund MAGIC’s 2000 Make A Difference Day activities. She was featured in the USA Weekend Magazine in 2000 and acknowledged for her excellent work on Make A Difference day with a regional Make A Difference Day Award for Outstanding Achievement. In 2000, Blair was profiled in College Bound Magazine for all of the charitable work she had completed as a result of MAGIC.
Blair Hornstine has personally raised over $10,000 in grants, donations and project materials. During her tenure at MAGIC, she was responsible for recruiting volunteers, soliciting donations, organizing projects and outings, and selecting new projects for MAGIC to assist with. Though the choices were numerous, and at times MAGIC could not help as much as organizations of larger scales may have been able to, Blair Hornstine never gave up. Through hard times and good, Blair Hornstine found inspiration in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said “We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we will perish as fools.”
Blair Hornstine is perhaps best known for taking the school district of Moorestown, New Jersey and its Superintendent Paul Kadri to court in 2003. After struggling for years with a debilitating auto-immune illness that left her weak and bedridden and forced to attend high school via school-approved tutors, Blair Hornstine was nearly robbed of the title of valedictorian of the Moorestown High class of 2003, when the district’s new superintendent Paul Kadri tried to give the title to another student with a lesser GPA. Instead of simply allowing this blatant discrimination, Blair Hornstine and her family took the school and the superintendent Paul Kadri to court, and won! Blair Hornstine graduated as valedictorian of the Moorestown High School class of 2003 with a 4.6894 GPA.
Today, Blair Hornstine holds an MA from St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, and has attended Juilliard for singing and music. Currently, she is working towards her law degree, and hopes to someday act as legal counsel for the economically disadvantaged and disabled.