SRQ Magazine | In Conversation with Nonprofit Innovators

OCTOBER 2023 EDITION

IN CONVERSATION WITH NONPROFIT INNOVATORS MAKING A COLLABORATIVE PHILANTHROPIC IMPACT IN OUR REGION. INTERVIEW BY WES ROBERTS | EDITED BY BARBIE HEIT

In Conversation

STACEY R. CORLEY PRESIDENT SARASOTA MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION

JOY MAHLER, PRESIDENT, CEO BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS OF THE SUN COAST

BILL SADLO PRESIDENT AND CEO BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF SARASOTA AND DESOTO COUNTIES

DR. KRISTIE SKOGLUND, IMH-ER CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER THE FLORIDA CENTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD

LET’S START BY SHARING A BIT OF INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ORGANIZATIONS. BILL SADLO, BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF SARASOTA AND DESOTO: We serve youth, six to 18 years old. We’re a facility-based program where kids come to us.

We have six full service sites in the two county area between Sarasota and DeSoto and five school sites where the youth stay after school for programs. During the school year, we are open from 2-6 pm after school, and during summers, 7:30 am-6:00 pm. We stay in line with the school calendar and we are open when the schools are closed. JOY MAHLER, BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS OF THE SUN COAST: We utilize community volunteers to mentor youth in a one-to-one method. We’re at the schools with our volunteers and we are also in the community.

It’s a wonderful intergenerational program utilizing adult volunteers and youth. The ages of our youth are between six and 21 (we continue the mentoring till they’re age 21 in a big futures type program).

We’re not as facility-based like Bill is, but we do partner with the Boys and Girls Club. We have bigs and littles that come to the club. It’s a

great partnership. KRISTIE SKOGLUND, THE FLORIDA CENTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD: We have a very specific mission to serve children and their families prenatal through elementary school, with a special focus on birth to years. We provide a lot of early intervention, prevention, and therapeutic services for families that are at risk. However, we can serve anyone in the community within some of our programs.

What differentiates the Florida Center is that not only can we provide a particular service for a family, like early childhood mental health, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and home visiting, but we can wrap services around families if they enter into one program. We have other services on our campus that we can wrap around that family, because we know that early childhood is oftentimes a journey, and a time when families are trying to figure out what’s happening for their young child.

They’re not quite sure. So they enter through one door, and then we assess and say, “Wow, I wonder, have you thought about this?” Or maybe this is the door that you came through, but when we screen

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IN C O NVERSAT I ON

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS Stacey R. Corley, President, Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation Stacey Corley joined Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation as president in September 2022. The Healthcare Foundation is the philanthropic partner of Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, providing the hospital with critical resources in the key areas of patient care, education, clinical research, technology and facilities. Prior to joining the Healthcare Foundation, Ms. Corley served as Vice President for Advancement at Ringling College of Art and Design. She originally joined that organization in 2012 as a Senior Development Officer, becoming Assistant Vice President for Strategic Philanthropy in 2014. Previously, Stacey served as Associate Director for Development for Florida State University Foundation/The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. She also worked 10 years for Bristol-Myers Squibb in various roles including Senior Hospital Business Manager. In the community, she has held leadership positions with multiple local and national organizations including Ringling College Library Association, Association of Fundraising Professionals and Junior League of Sarasota, and is a member of Sarasota Women’s Alliance. Stacey holds a Bachelor of Professional Accountancy and Master of Business Administration in Management from Mississippi State University.

Joy Mahler, President and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Sun Coast Joy is a graduate of Michigan State University where she earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Human Sciences. She a ended the American Institute for Nonprofit Management, Duke University, and completed an Executive

for the child overall, we see that maybe they could use a speech and language evaluation to rule some of those things out. STACEY R. CORLEY, SARASOTA MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION: It is the philanthropic arm of SMH so we work with donors to help create possibilities at the hospital above and beyond what the healthcare system would normally be able to do. And many of those things are services that are not reimbursable, or they’re additive to what the hospital’s already doing. One of the ways that we connect with children is the First 1000 Days, which is a program that SMH manages and connects through a software system with lots of other nonprofits in our community, to help babies and families during the first 1,000 days. It connects families with organizations like Florida Center for Early Childhood, Boys and Girls Club, and others where people may have needs that are not hospital related, but will help keep their family healthy and well. We also have the only NICU in our community, so we deliver lots of babies, even babies who are not going to the NICU, and we do nurse training, as well. We are just getting ready to open our new behavioral health center in December, and we’re going to have a lot of new programs for youth there, including youth-intensive outpatient programs.

WHAT DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION DO THAT MIGHT SURPRISE PEOPLE? SKOGLUND: What we hear often when we invite people to our main campus in Sarasota for a tour is, “We didn’t realize how much you do. We didn’t realize how large you are.” We have 150 employees.

In one of our programs, we serve the entire state, and we’re in five counties. When folks hear about the Center for Early Childhood, they may think about our preschool. We have a preschool on our campuses. Our main school is in Sarasota, and we have a North

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Port campus that has children who have diagnosed developmental delays or disabilities who attend our preschools. They may know us for that–our Starfish Academy. But maybe they didn’t realize that we work with kids in the court system, the early childhood court we do. People also hear about our fetal alcohol program.

That is our diagnostic evaluation and parent support program for children prenatally exposed to drugs and alcohol but they often don’t realize that we are serving families from all over the state with satellite locations.

CORLEY: SMH isthe largest employer in Sarasota County. But I think people assume their taxes pay for everything and that there’s no fundraising or donor support needed, and that really couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a very small percentage of what happens. Certainly, there are medical things that are reimbursable through insurance or Medicare, Medicaid, those kinds of things.

But providing care for uninsured, underinsured, and indigent patients as well as advancing medical equipment are things that our foundation does, as well as adding on clinical research.

A lot of times, people think the hospital system must not need the money. We are not fundraising necessarily for buildings. We’re fundraising for what happens inside the buildings and the programs that are on top of standard things you’d find at most hospitals. SADLO: People would be surprised to hear some of the things that our teams are doing, whether it be through our Perlman Price Young Entrepreneur program, where youth are learning about business models, getting funding–Shark Tank style–starting their own businesses. We have youth running nonprofit businesses and for-profit businesses right now through this program and also youth serving on boards throughout the county, both in government boards and nonprofit boards through our STAR Lead-

ership program where they get 60 hours of training, learn about civic engagement and leadership, and then at the end they can serve as a full voting member on nonprofit board. MAHLER: When we started over a hundred years ago, it was all about connecting children with a mentor and that’s about as far as it went. That’s probably what most people think we do. But what we have found is we have a wonderful opportunity to get to know the needs of the families and children. There are educational needs focused on the individual needs of the youth and their families. It’s workforce opportunity, giving them beyond school walls, getting more involved with education which we know is a major pillar in the life of our youth. If they don’t graduate high school, they’re just really a step behind in success. We work with them in more of a 360 model than when we first started out and what we found is it came from our volunteers saying, “Look, we need more help with this. Do you have more resources to help us with that?” So as they’ve become more involved with the youth, whether it is reading in education, whether it is high school graduation, or it’s workforce development, we’ve found that we’ve become more involved with their success and what’s actually going to help them be successful in life.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES OR OPPORTUNITIES THAT YOU SEE IN OUR COMMUNITY? SADLO: We all take for granted when we see some of the things that are going on in the world around us that we can deal with it. We all responded to natural disasters. When we see the conflict that’s going on in our country and the world we don’t realize how that affects our youth and what they’re going through. We saw a national statistic, that 42% of high schoolers felt helpless or sad last year. And so we have a mental health crisis with our youth and that is something that we all have

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IN C O NVERSAT I ON

Education program at Columbia University. Since 1983, Joy has served as President & CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Sun Coast, whose programs serve over 1500 children in ten counties of South West Florida. She is the Current Co-Chair of the Large Agency Alliance for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and was pivotal in creating and launching the Beyond School Walls (BSW) Program in Lee/Hendry County as well as in Sarasota County. Joy has been recognized for her Community Leadership, and received the “Effort for Advocacy for Girls and Women” award. Joy and her husband have four children, and seven grandchildren.

Bill Sadlo, President and CEO, Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota and Desoto Counties Bill Sadlo’s journey with Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota and DeSoto Counties began early as a proud Club member of the Fruitville Boys Club (now the Lee Wetherington Boys & Girls Club).

Bill graduated from Sarasota High School and acquired his Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education from the University of South Florida in 1992 before joining the organization. Bill has devoted his career to the mission that enabled him to succeed. In 2017, Boys & Girls Clubs of America presented Bill with the National Professional Service Award to honor his 30 years of service. He has been recognized for his dedication with awards including; the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance Bull by the Horns Award, the inaugural Boys & Girls of America Youth Megaphone Award the Boys & Girls of America Robert M. Sykes Award, the Sarasota Magazine Unity Award, and the SRQ Media Good Hero Award.

to address together and our community has to come around to. Boys and Girls Club wants to be a part of that solution. MAHLER: A lot of times our families may be in lowwage jobs. What our volunteers do is work with the youth to experience something that maybe their family has not. So for example, in the Beyond School Walls program, which is our workforce development, we actually take our littles to a business and they are matched with a person from that business.

They experience what the business is like. Plymouth Harbor is one that we are partnered with and it isn’t just caring for elderly residents, it’s the accounting department, the marketing department. It’s learning more than what they typically would learn. Sarasota Memorial is another one. They’re a wonderful hospital with all different careers.

We find we’re able to expose our kids to opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have had. We’ve had challenges or opportunities through the pandemic, and I know Bill also experienced this as well, and what I find is the resilience of our children and the ingenuity of our volunteers. We went virtual in a lot of what we offered during that time and we discovered that our volunteers were not tech-savvy, as many of us didn’t Zoom prior to the pandemic. But we learned that out of that adversity, ingenuity can thrive. We can rise above it.

CORLEY: We just celebrated the 30th anniversary of our community specialty clinic which helps patients who otherwise would not be able to see a specialist. They’ve been referred through primary care in some way, whether it’s the health department, or through some other organization and maybe they need an oncologist, psychiatrist, a dermatologist, a cardiologist, some other specialist.

This community specialty clinic has volunteer physicians, but donors really help support the ability to have this clinic up and running, to have staff to be able to see the patients. And in the end, what does that mean? That means those

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patients are getting good healthcare.

They’re able to treat the conditions they might have and it also helps keep people out of the ER that would normally use the ER. Instead, they can go to the community specialty clinic, get more long term treatment, and stay well. SKOGLUND: My background is in early childhood mental health.

When people hear about infant mental health, they think about babies on couches, because we think about traditional mental health services, counseling and talk therapy. The field has a broad spectrum. Pretty much anyone that is involved with young children is on the spectrum of influencing a young child’s mental health. We have preschool teachers, early care educators, OTs, speech and language folks and home visitors.

Anyone that touches a child’s life is part of that continuum of infant early childhood mental health. I think what a lot of folks don’t realize is how early experiences shape the rest of our lives, especially in the first three years and if you see a problem early on, it’s likely not going to get better–it might actually get worse. So the motto, ‘when in doubt, check it out,’ is really important for someone raising a young child, because their early experiences and early potential developmental delays or disabilities that go unidentified can have impacts on the child when they enter into their elementary age years, and not just in terms of education, but in terms of the relationships with those around them. The adults who are caring for the child, their primary caregivers, their school teachers in elementary or preschool. It becomes challenging for the adults to engage with the child in a meaningful way, because the child has particular challenges or ways of behaving. You don’t learn how to parent from having a baby, you learn how to parent from the way you were parented. Sometimes, it’s just small little tweaks that we can do.

WHAT ARE WAYS THAT PEOPLE CAN HELP? CORLEY: Volunteering hands-on is one way people can help. Another way is by making gifts, no matter the amount. Donors can go to our website or they can

call us if they want to learn more about an area. Maybe they want to know about what’s going to happen in the behavioral health pavilion that’s going to open in December. Maybe they’ve experienced a particular thing in their family that they want to help make a difference for others because maybe they’ve been the beneficiary of that at some point in their life. Behavioral health has had a spotlight shone on it during the pandemic and during these last few years so we’ve seen how that’s evolved over time and people’s willingness to address concerns that maybe long ago they would not have even talked about.

No matter what area somebody is interested in, we’re happy to have a conversation to talk about that more with them. MAHLER: You can’t change the world for all children, but you can change it for one child. A volunteer can’t reach 10,000 children in a day, but he or she is reaching the one they are working with and is going to make a difference in that child’s life. SKOGLUND: We love our volunteers. Some retirees will come out and they’ll help us with our grounds, the weeds, laying bricks, or putting mulch down.

Things like that are invaluable because we want our grounds to look beautiful. We also have had retired folks come into our preschool and read stories to the kids, play music, sing songs with them just to be an extra body in the classroom that is supporting the teaching staff.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH. MAHLER: If we look at the news in the world, we don’t always know what is fact and what is hype. And youth don’t know whether or not we’re going to survive the event because they have no experience to tell them that they will survive, and they don’t have the experience on how to navigate things the way their parents do. Bill and I both work with families that have limited resources and oftentimes much

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Dr. Kristie Skoglund, IMH-ER, Chief Executive Officer, The Florida Center for Early Childhood Kristie has been a licensed mental health counselor since 2000 and is recognized as an Infant Mental Health Endorsed Professional by the states of Michigan and Florida.

Kristie has a Master’s degree in Counseling and Psychology and a Doctorate degree in the same field. In January of 1997, Sarasota County became the first county in Florida to privatize child welfare and Kristie was hired as a mental health counselor to work with young children in the foster care system. She has completed the 18-month infant mental health training through Florida State University’s Harris Institute, and in 2003 she received specialized Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders Diagnostic training through the University of Washington. Kristie has formal training in Child-Parent Psychotherapy and is a trained facilitator of the Circle of Security Parenting program. Kristie has expertise in the areas of infant/ young children’s mental health, trauma-informed care practices, and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and has presented workshops on various related topics at local, state and national conferences.

more limited resources than your average Sarasota County citizen. That’s where the club, the volunteers, their reassurance and encouragement come in. These kids are tremendous, in terms of the amount of potential. They just don’t have access to the network or connections to achieve that potential always. In terms of mental health, I think we need to encourage and inspire our youth.

We all need somebody to listen to us because being listened to is affirming and that’s all a part of mental health as well. SADLO: Joy, that’s a good segue for how we fit into that, the solution to the problem. You laid out the problem and we used to just try to be a resource and send our families to where they could get help. We’ve partnered with the Florida Center and they gave us the mental health professional at one of our clubs as a pilot and it worked tremendously. So in our upcoming budget for this year, we have a mental health professional that will be throughout all six of our clubs. And then we’re going to put social workers at each club from our partners at the school system and that’s how we’re going to address it. Joy laid out what the youth are seeing these days, and it doesn’t matter, all youth are affected by the environment out there. I used that statistic about the 42% of high school students who felt helpless or sad and it’s something we have to address and we’re going to jump in and try to be more part of the solution.

CORLEY: The new Cornell Behavioral Health Pavilion at SMH will be a different approach to behavioral health, mental health. Not only do we have a beautiful new facility for inpatient care, but also for outpatient treatment. I don’t think mental health issues just came up for kids in the last couple years. I think they were brewing. I even said five years ago, “What are they going to say 20 years from now that what were we doing for youth related to behavioral health?”

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And then a pandemic landed on top of it and just made it worse. I think there are lots of things to consider, just the way life is now and social media. There’s a lot of things that children today have to deal with that we didn’t have to deal with. We’ve had a lot of donors step up and say it’s really important to them that we do all we can. And I think historically, behavioral health as a genre probably didn’t have as much philanthropic support as other areas. Our community members are now stepping up and saying, “Yes, it is important.”

Certainly we’re not the only place in town that does this. There are a lot of institutions. They all work together really closely in the behavioral health arena. We’re fortunate that we live in a place where people want to help others and do things to make our community better by sharing what they have, whether it’s their time, or their talent, or their funding.

SKOGLUND: The community has absolutely rallied together to help families. It has been unbelievable to me to watch, especially our funding partners and donors, as Stacy was mentioning, just open their hearts and support what the nonprofits themselves could not do. Similar to the hospital, we serve all families.

We also are Medicaid providers. We bill insurance of most types. And so while we can serve any family of any socioeconomic status, we do serve between 65 and 75% of families who are on the economic edge in some way. Life is hard for children in general, and it’s very, very stressful for children to grow up today, for a variety of reasons. So to add family stress, financial stress, health stress, social stress, all of those things, and then expect children not to have behavioral mental health or other developmental challenges is unrealistic.

WHAT GOAL DO YOU SET WHEN YOUR FOCUS IS CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE? MAHLER: To be a productive member of their community. We provide scholarships for families, which is one indicator of how we have evolved over the years.

We’re a partner with Florida Prepaid

so that we help identify youth that are looking at post-secondary or some type of post high school learning. We also have scholarships within Big Brothers Big Sisters. When we look at equity in children and arriving on your first day prepared for school, we’re doing a lot more in the area of school readiness and preparedness through our scholarship programs and through community support. I know Bill does that as well, but we make sure on day one they have what they need at school to feel successful.

SADLO: Exactly–to be productive members of the community, but now we’re seeing that you have to involve the whole family and that’s something new for us. Through having social workers and using some mental-health programming we’ve done, we’ve also realized you have to involve the parents or the caretakers.

And they don’t know all the resources that are out there. So we learned the warm handoff is really important.

You can give folks the resources but that doesn’t mean they’re going to access them right, or follow through on it. Involving the whole family has been something that’s changed for us and that we’ve learned.

THERE MAY BE A PRESUMPTION THAT THE CHILDREN IN THESE PROGRAMS ARE THERE BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS DON’T CARE, BUT THE PARENTS MAY HAVE ISSUES THAT THEY THEMSELVES HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO OVERCOME AND THEY’RE NOT ABLE TO MANIFEST THAT CARING ROLE THE WAY THAT THEY PROBABLY WISH THEY COULD. CAN YOU SPEAK TO THAT? SKOGLUND: Part of the work of any good organization that serves children and families is to have a standard practice of assuming the best in the parents. I think old school is, “This kid’s acting up, his parents need to get him in line. What are the parents doing to not get this kid to be doing whatever society feels like they should be doing?” I think we’ve come a long way in trying to ask the questions, because when we see behavior, we make a lot of assumptions and we

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IN CON VERS AT ION

need to ask the right questions, “I wonder why this child is doing this.

I wonder what he does at home. I wonder what struggles the parents have. I wonder what they’ve done to help him. I wonder what obstacles they’ve run into accessing services for their child. I wonder, are there issues at home that create barriers for them to even see what’s going on?” We have children that go home to parents who have substance abuse issues. We have to wonder more and try to engage families.

Blaming parents for their child’s challenges or perceived challenges I think in many ways says more about the provider than it does about the parents. The providers should really be trying to engage the families and if they can’t, to partner with an organization who can take a deeper dive to engage with those families. Access to services is a real issue for families. Not just accessing it, but getting there. Is there a financial implication for accessing these services? What do those services mean to the parent? We have to assume the parent wants what’s best for this child. And if they knew how to do that, they would.

So there’s something there we can do to help them. MAHLER: All of these parents love their children or they wouldn’t involve them in the club or with us. They love their children and they want the absolute best for their children and they’re amazing individuals.

Their peers are one thing, and it’s tough, middle school is tough, it’s probably the toughest part of life.

But I think when you have added people, another caring adult in the life of a child, that’s what helps them build. I just want to be clear that their parents care.

They may be working two jobs, sometimes three jobs. It may be availability, but they do love and care for them. SADLO: Whether it be the 1800s, or the early 1900s, or 2023, one thing has not changed. Youth look up to caring adults. They want someone to be there for them, to listen to them. So we know we have high level programs at our Boys and

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Girls Clubs. We have really nice facilities. We’re blessed to be here with such a supporting community. But when we talk to our club alumni, that is not what they talk about. They don’t talk about the beautiful building or that program.

They talk about the person that made a difference in their life. And so that’s not going to change over a hundred years, 200 years, 300 years. That is a time-tested principle. CORLEY: To Kristie’s points, sometimes the parents may not even know when to ask for help.

I think the work that they do, the work that a lot of nonprofits do, the work that we do at SMH is here to support parents and families when it comes to us. And sometimes, when it doesn’t come to us on its own, it comes up in a different way.

Someone has to refer or someone else has to get involved to get the help that the young person needs.

I think that we do live in a really caring community where we’ve got evidence that donors are stepping up to help young people.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES THAT FOUNDATION MONEY HAS ALLOWED TO BE GENERATED OR OPEN THEIR DOORS IN THE LAST FEW YEARS? CORLEY: We have a lot of nurse navigators who help patients through disease in the cancer area. We have some in cardiology. From the moment you’re diagnosed or even before you’re diagnosed, you’re assigned someone who can help you navigate the pathway ahead, and treatments. That’s a really good example of philanthropic support that has made those positions possible. NICU beds are called giraffe beds. They’re shaped a little bit like a giraffe with a long neck that sticks up. But those actually have expiration dates and they’re $45,000 each. I think people would be surprised to know that. We’ve had a lot of donors help support us supplying those to the NICU. Research–there are a lot of research areas. Women’s cancer as well as other areas of research have been

really important. And they’ve been supported only through donors. Also nursing scholarships are things that are really specific where donors can help. We try to give opportunities to nurses or to staff who want to become nurses.

So you could have someone who maybe they’re a custodian today, they’re working, and they see what’s going on, and they want to go back to school and become a nurse. We can help with the nurse scholarships through SMH who determines how they’re given out.

HOW CAN OUR READERS SUPPORT YOUR PROGRAMS? SKOGLUND: We have two things coming up. One is a gala on December 1st at Michael’s On East that we always love for folks to attend, sponsor, let their friends and families know about. I think equally as important, if not maybe a little more important is our LEAP campaign, which is Learning through Exploration, Activity, and Play. We’re trying to raise $500,000 by the end of our fiscal year, which is June 30th, to help support our children with special needs in our programs. We’re redoing a lot of our play equipment and our classrooms, and getting a lot of new equipment for our OTs and our speech and language pathologists. Our buildings are old. A lot of our equipment’s old.

We need a lot of new things. We would love for folks to support our LEAP campaign. And there is no monetary dollar amount that is too small. Every little bit matters.

MAHLER: Most of our volunteers are older volunteers. We live in an older community and they have a wealth of experience and knowledge and expertise to lend to a friendship with youth that may not have that experience in their family. So they could certainly volunteer to be a big brother or a big sister, be a part of our scholarships program or be a donor. Both Bill and I would welcome donations to help support our programs. You can give your time or you can give your wealth and your wisdom. The

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bottom line is that investing in our youth will make a huge difference for all of us. We’re opening a mentoring center probably in January when we’ve remodeled this building we’ve purchased. And in there we’re going to have a STEM center, a summer reading program, doing some workforce development, internet safety, environmental sustainability. We’ve got a lot of exciting opportunities to partner with us in the mentoring center.

And if a person has expertise–they don’t have time to do the one-onone mentoring, but they want to volunteer in another way–we are open and excited to welcome all partners and individuals looking to help us inspire the potential of youth. Our goal is to reach 2,000 youth and this too is a capital project of the Mentoring Center. So if anyone is interested in investing in youth in either volunteerism or being a part of our capital empow-

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er potential campaign, we’d love to have them involved as well.

SADLO: And all the things Joy mentioned are investments in our youth. Invest whatever you can invest, whether it be your time, your treasure, your talent, but also tell others about it if you think it’s a worthwhile program. What’s the end game? To make caring, productive, responsible citizens.

And there are numerous ways they can do that. Joy mentioned the mentoring to get them ready for post-secondary education. The same things happen here with our college and career track and partnerships that we have through Florida Prepaid with organizations like Take Stock In Children, where they provide the mentor for us in early high school years or middle school years and identify them and use the Florida Prepaid to get them those scholarships. We’re now finishing up construction of our

IN CO NV E R S AT I O N

new club in Arcadia. We’ll be dedicating that on September 28th.

We unfortunately have to build a new club in North Port courtesy of Hurricane Ian and the new Gene Matthews Club planning is going on right now. We’ll be able to kick off construction hopefully by the end of the year this calendar year. And we also have plans to completely rebuild our Roy McBean Club in Newtown, and that is the club on 21st Street that is built on public housing property.

So those types of capital projects are there for people to get involved in, but most importantly, we want to deepen the impact we’re having on our youth. CORLEY: We have Rock The Roof coming up October 21st, which supports women and children’s services at SMH. It’s an outdoor, on top of a garage rock party that’s a lot of fun. And then we’re also trying to finish our cancer campaign. We’re

getting ready to break ground on a new cancer pavilion which is still very important to us trying to keep cancer patients home where they don’t have to travel for our services. And you heard me talk about behavioral health. There’s a lot of opportunity. We’d love to talk with anybody about questions they might have and how they can get involved. We’re in an enviable position I think. We just talked about this yesterday with our team. We live in a community where people are still moving here, things are being built. They’re moving here with capacity and interest in being philanthropic. And I can tell you, there are lots of places in the country who have the exact opposite happening. They’ve got people moving away. They’re not supporting the work they’re doing.

And we’re really fortunate we live in such a wonderful place. SRQ

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