ACBL Educational Foundation

To introduce more people - of all ages and walks of life - to the game of bridge, regardless of whether it's social, duplicate or a simplified stepping-stone game and to develop a network of casual bridge players and encourage their engagement with the game.

Military initiative - teaching bridge to soldiers, officers and their families on three army bases. Intent is to reach out to all forms of the military with similar efforts. Four army bases covered in February 2023.

Outreach to young people (ages 10+) to learn bridge by supporting the launch of an app entitled Tricky Bridge. Establishment of BridgeWhiz, LLC a sole-ownership organization under ACBLEF that teaches beginning bridge digitally to school aged children 11-17 for free in the North America and Great Britain.

Outreach to college aged people through competitive college games and a final college bowl. It will grant out $74K during 2023 to support college initiatives.

Outreach to social bridge players by creating a social bridge hub that includes a link to Trickster Cards where people can play in a friendly, social environment while seeing each other across the virtual bridge table.

Outreach to middle schoolers through grants that support bridge camps, Saturday academies and programs like that started with the Boys and Girls Club of Dundee Township, and continue with the Youth Bridge Camp in Carlinville, Il

ACBL Educational Foundation has the capacity to attain all these goals through grantmaking to worthy programs addressing different segments of the population. Additionally it has a Program Manager for the BridgeWhiz program and an assistant program manager to help in curriculum development as the program has grown to include intermediate players who graduated from beginning bridge and also a program whereby parents are able to learn bridge at the same time and through the same program so that young people learning bridge have adults to play with, introduce them to games in clubs where they play and continue their bridge education.

* ACBLEF has grown its public support from $74K to $379K since 2020.

* Tricky Bridge launched to the general public in October 2020. It currently has over 1M visitors to its site and created a young people's team of bridge players who competed in the World Championships in Salsamaggiore Italy in 2022.

We launched BridgeWhiz in 2021 and it became its own LLC in 2022 changing from an online program on the ACBLEF website to a dedicated LMS program with its own website. We are in our fifth "Beginning Bridge" class, are in the process of converting it to a quarterly program with rolling admissions and graduated 450 young people aged 11-17 in 2022. We created and managed "The Whiz Kids Bridge Club" where kids can play free on Sunday afternoons online with other kids. Both sites are child protected.

* Social Bridge Online - Bridge with Friends has had more that 5000 players since its launch during 2022. It's biggest audiences were during Covid, but is still in operation, cosponsoring the program with Trickster Bridge.

* Learn Bridge in a Day? has been taught to soldiers and their families at Fort Jackson, prior to covid 19 removing possibilities to address two additional army bases. It restarted in 2022 at the Alaskan Joint Forces Air Force Base and in February 2023 provided the course to four military installations in Colorado.

* Best Practices for teaching bridge online has had its first test course and had its debut in 2020. It resumed the program in 2022 in Providence, RI. We also funded a digital teacher training course with ACBL which has trained over 200 teachers to teach bridge online.