Vero Beach Rowing Inc

We want to expand our outreach programs in the disadvantaged community to give these youths the opportunities for personal enrichment and eventually college scholarship opportunities that rowing provides.

Our programs to date have been successful and growing, despite the COVID 19 disruptions. The table below shows the number of youths on scholarship support since we initiated this program around 3 years ago.

Season Number of kids
Spring 2018 1
Fall 2018 4

Spring 2019 4
Summer 2019 18
Fall 2019 19

Spring 2020 8
Summer 2020 27
Fall 2020 12

Spring 2021 12
Summer 2021 21
Fall 2021 TBD

We intend to continue to increase these numbers. One of the great things about rowing is that everyone winds up in the same boat. Older and more experienced youth mentor the younger and less skillful.

We have already made great strides as outlined above.

Strategies for success include:

- Increasing the number of strategic partners than can identify these youths and bring them to us.
- Expand and continue to develop our existing partnerships.
-Expand our funding support of these programs. So far the funding has come from internal resources, but the expanded programs are going to require better outreach to funders and different funders.
-Add staff to specifically address the recruiting, retention and training of the disadvantaged youth.
-Develop a working partnership with the local school district.

We have demonstrated our capabilities in all of these areas:

-We have or have had partnerships with local agencies in our county that work with disadvantaged youth. These include:
• Gifford Youth Achievement Center
• Boys & Girls Clubs
• Hibiscus House
• Homeless Children's Foundation of Indian River County
• Crossover Mission

-We have devoted staff time to nourish these relationships and to make sure that their youth have a good and safe experience with us. We have plans to hire specialists in this function as the program expands.
- We have successfully raised funds for this program for 3 years, covering all of the needs. As the programs expand, funding requirements will exceed our internal capacity, limiting our capabilities and program success.
- It is clear that recruiting and retaining these youths is more complicated than normal. Our existing staff has managed to keep up with it, but we also know that we will require dedicated staff for this purpose.

Our progress to date, as measured by our primary indicator, the number of registrants, is great. See the results in the table above. Even with the disruptions caused by the COVID situation, we have managed to grow the program every year since it started 3 years ago.

We have successfully operated and funded the program with our internal resources.

What is next is to execute our strategy. We have implemented a donor database and management software package to replace what has been a very informal system. Getting past COVID will increase our capacity which is currently restricted to the use of small boats. The larger boats accomodate more youths, but the distance between heads is around 4-5 ft, insufficient for social distancing. Our County still has a relatively high infection rate, which is one measure that USRowing uses to decide when to allow use of the larger boats.