Operations & Activity Report
Dear Donors and Members,
I am writing on behalf of the board of directors of the Foundation to report on activities and operations over the first half of this year. I will break my report into several headings.
Development of Individual Funds: Contributions continue to accumulate slowly but steadily for most of our 15 or so dedicated funds. We have had significant interest in developing new individual funds.
The Woman’s TruAthlete fund has been started to build an endownment fund for the benefit of Women’s national team players.The fundraising hasnot gone as well as hoped and I will be trying to bring on some more people to help Megan Howat.
The CORE group out of Kelowna have instituted a successful drive to create a Courtney Walls Scholarship within the CORE fund.
They have raised over 16,000 in the last two months.
Howard and Marina Gerwing and a matching donor have pledged 10,000 over the next two years to create a fund for scholarships for Cowichan Valley rugby players. Cowichan Valley , outside of Victoria and Vancouver has probably produced as many National Team players at various age levels as anywhere in Canada
Led by George’s son and daughter Brett and Sarah and Gerald Hartwig we held a very successful George Jones testimonial dinner to raise funds for a scholarship in his name. Together with matching funds that scholarship endownment is now close to 80,000. Over 330 people attended a plate dinner at the Empress where George was carried in on a stretcher by four Rugby Canada National Women’s team players.
Hong Kong Funds. This year our end of the event was organized by Rugby Canada and Matthuw Ronald-Jones on behalf of the Foundation and the group in Hong Kong. We are still awaiting accounting and final figures but it seemed to be a succesful event. On the field Canada endured a pool loss against Zimbabwe and narrow victory over Spain to survive a harrowing first round and then go on in sudden death elimination through to the semis. They finished in the final again against Spain and won convincingly to move through to a guaranteed spot in next year’s Irb series. This accomplishment cannot be overemphasized. The Foundation contributed significantly to this result by advancing 20,000 to assist the team to assemble early. Mark Wyatt spoke at the luncheon on our behalf and I attended as well as Pat Aldous.
General Funds. We continue to have limited success in attracting donations to our general funds although market gains, significantly lower adminstrative expenses, and modest donations have contributed to a growth in our overall portfolio from the region of 1,700,000 to the proximity of 2,000,000
Operations. The last 6 months have been challenging in attempting to do with volunteers what we were doing with the assistance of an executive director. However we have completed the transfer of all bank and investment account signatories, updated all fund balances, kept up to date with all donation reciepts, completed all legal requirements including a bit of catch up for prior years, maintained and enhanced our website, developed and documented three new funds, awarded the Gerald McGavin coaching award, started a committee to consider grant and scholarship requests and held several board meetings. Thanks go to Pat Aldous, John Wrafter, Blake Lewis and many others as well as Matthuw for assisting in the transition. Bethany and Breann have been helping part-time with the all esential book-keeping and accounting functions and by and large this aspect is well in hand and we have also implemented some improvements to the classification of donations to guide our future direction.
Mike Holmes
Chair
