Thursday, Feb 23, 2012
Dr. Rev. DeForest B. “Buster” Soaries, former New Jersey Secretary of State, will give the keynote address on Tuesday, February 28, during the closing ceremony of the Black History Month Celebration at Rider University.
by Meaghan Haugh
Dr. Rev. DeForest B. “Buster” Soaries, former New Jersey Secretary of State, will give the keynote address during the closing ceremony of the Black History Month Celebration at Rider University. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, February 28, at 7 p.m. in Bart Luedeke Center Cavalla Room on the Lawrenceville campus.
Soaries is the Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey. He is the author of dfree®: Breaking Free from Financial Slavery, published by Zondervan. Founded in 2005, his dfree® campaign is a strategy to lead people, families and organizations out of debt to attain financial independence. Soaries and his dfree® strategy were the focus of the third installment of CNN’s Black in America documentary Almighty Debt.
Nearly a year after dfree® was featured on CNN, Soaries announced the Billion Dollar Challenge. The Billion Dollar Challenge is a grassroots campaign that challenges people to pay off their debt. His goal is to get 125,000 people to pay off $1 billion in debt in three years. Participants are able to track their debt payments through an online tool on his dfree® website – www.mydfree.org Soaries has also launched a multi-city campaign to spread the word about the Challenge.
Soaries served as New Jersey's 30th Secretary of State and is a popular speaker at colleges, universities, conferences and churches around the world as well as a frequent advisor to major corporations in the areas of diversity, philanthropy and community relations. It is his goal for his 7,000-member congregation to be debt free and to train and encourage other churches and community based organizations to follow suit.