On Thursday night in Manhattan, Jay-Z hosted a carnival along the Hudson River for his Shawn Carter Foundation. The event, called Making the Ordinary Extraordinary, aimed to raise money for college scholarships for disadvantaged youth.

MTV News built with Hov on the scene at the event, where he discussed his foundation's goals: "Just providing opportunity and seeing what people do with that opportunity," he said. "If you want to go further and you want to further your education, just giving someone that extra little push [so] that maybe you'll turn out to be someone special."

Hov started the foundation with his mother, Gloria Carter, in 2002 to help disadvantaged kids go to college. It started small, with just one student, but expanded quickly, offering 50 scholarships to students in 50 different states annually from 2003 to 2005. The foundation has awarded more than 750 students scholarships totaling upwards of $1.1 million, and nearly 500 kids have participated in the organization's college tours.

"My mom has been running this for a number of years," Jay said. "My mom gets on the bus and takes the kids and takes them to their orientations and she's been riding around the colleges. It's a real grassroots thing that she's been doing on her own, and I'm just really trying to help her expand it so we can help more people. It started out as a Brooklyn thing, and then it started as a New York thing, and now hopefully we can take it to a worldwide thing."

(Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images)