LAS VEGAS NORTHWEST ROTARY FOUNDATION

The Las Vegas Northwest Rotary Foundation, dba Summerlin Rotary Foundation, raises funds for the Summerlin Rotary Club's charitable activities, serving its 60-plus members throughout the year.

The foundation, served by a nine-member board of club members, focuses its funding on these priorities

1) Literacy - with an emphasis on pre-K and elementary students. Our primary program is funding Book Vending Machines installed in elementary schools for students who earn "gold coins" for their academic achievement - and thus "purchase" a book appropriate from kindergarten through fifth grade to build their home libraries and read with their parents.

2) Food insecurity - with an emphasis raising funds to finance monthly Pop-up Markets at a local high school where our volunteers pack the trunks of more than 200 families each time. Previously, we have raised funds and offered volunteers to deliver food to home-bound neighbors, especially during the pandemic.

3) Supplementing our school's budgets - With budget cuts and limits, our community schools need extra support. We work with their administrators to finance a swath of needs - from financing junior high robotics teams; to purchasing tickets for cultural field trips, to supporting high school track and field meets with purchased trophies and medals to sponsoring speech and music contests.

4) Supporting our neediest veterans - Las Vegas is home to a large veterans population, many of whom suffer from physical and emotional injuries from their service. We work with other veterans organizations and raise money to help stem suicides, purchase durable equipment and sponsor our own Golfing for Veterans event.

Our foundation stands ready to respond to other nonprofit needs, distributing as much as $50,000 a year in small grants - which require in turn for us to raise those funds ourselves. That's a major endeavor given that the foundation has no paid staff and depends entirely on volunteer club members.

This year, the foundation will embark on a community assessment project to learn more about the needs of our neighbors, working with leader across multiple worlds - from business and education to health and religion. In this way, we will be better able to focus our work and giving where it is most needed.

Of course, we understand already that in a community where 60 percent of third graders fail to read at that level and of those, one in six won't graduate high school, education will always be a priority and our foundation will work tirelessly to raise funds to support our students especially with our Book Vending Machine campaign.