Venice Yacht Club Charitable Foundation

Your Venice Yacht Club Charitable Foundation Committee met on February 19 and voted to establish a scholarship process with the Rotary Futures organization. We are starting with three separate $1,000 scholarships. We are hoping to be ready to make the scholarship awards by mid to late spring this year. The basic scholarship requirements are that the applicant must reside in the South Sarasota County area and be planning to pursue a four year Bachelor’s degree, two year Associate’s degree, or an accredited technical program related to maritime or hospitality fields. There will be a formal application process. The Rotary Futures will assist us in finding applicants.

Our next grant application cycle ends on April 30. We currently have about $9,000 available for this grant cycle.

We are also working on a grant for the Venice Performing Arts Center. We have $18,500 set aside for the Center and are evaluating some preliminary grant proposals they have suggested.

Sandra Frank from All Faiths Food Bank gave a report on the Sprout truck the VYCCF sponsored last year. Sandra advised us that our $30,000 grant from the Foundation was leveraged to result in more than $200,000 in grants to start the Sprout project. There are 11 participating agencies in Sarasota County that receive vegetable distributions from the truck. More than 53,000 people were served by the Sprout truck in 2014. Clients received an average of 11.67 pounds of produce per visit.

We are pleased to welcome some new members to our Foundation Committee: Warren Miller, Paul Nasipak, P/C Joe Dombrowski, and John O’Donnell. John O’Donnell has agreed to serve as our Treasurer this year.

Respectfully submitted,
Wayne Hall, VYCCF Chairman

VYCCF Committee:
Wayne Hall-Chair, P/C Joe Dombrowski, P/C Merle Graser, Warren Miller, John Moore, Jack Murphy, Paul Nasipak, John O’Donnell, Melinda Short, and Judith Wilcox.

Charting a course to a better community…