Now that we are halfway through 2017, we thought it would be a good time to provide an update on what the CANA Foundation has been up to this year. We started off with a bang – officially launching CANA Foundation January 1, 2017. What began as a key component of the founding of CANA Advisors has grown to a fully functioning element of the company, focused on giving back to the communities that the CANA Team lives and works in each day.
Gathering for Women CANA Foundation has taken on two initiatives so far, this year. The first was spear-headed by Harrison Schramm, one of our Principal Operations Research Analysts, who saw an opportunity to give back to Gathering for Women, a Monterey, California-based non-profit organization. Gathering for Women’s mission is to serve the needs of homeless women and help them transition out of homelessness. They had a need for better managing the records of their clients to support grant writing, responsibility to donors, and ensure fairness in distributing resources. Harrison jumped at the chance to use his skills and develop a solution to their existing spreadsheet method of record-keeping, which was complex, contained redundant information, and was prone to inaccuracy.
Harrison created an application that solved all those problems. In the application, the information can now easily be edited by most computer users, contains accurate records of their clients, and significantly reduces the chance of inadvertently changing existing information. This initiative is truly a win-win scenario, where a CANA team member was able to use valuable skills to help Gathering for Women take care of some of their administrative tasks accurately and efficiently; freeing them to focus on taking care of and helping the homeless women in the Monterey area!
Camp Schreiber We are thrilled to tell you about Camp Schreiber Foundation, a non-profit based in Wilmington, NC, that CANA Foundation has recently begun to support! Focused on growing and mentoring our young men, Camp Schreiber is centered around a one-week camp in July each year where campers focus on team work, character building, educational goals and leadership through a variety of activities. During the remaining 51 weeks of the year, Camp Schreiber provides tutoring, mentorship and extracurricular activities to the campers. Campers are accepted into the Camp Schreiber program through a competitive process, beginning in middle school, with the ultimate goal of preparing them to successfully attend and graduate from a four-year for college and to become future leaders in their communities.
What is so exciting about partnering with Camp Schreiber is the opportunity to invest in the development and mentorship of young men who will one day be leaders in the military, business, civic, and political organizations in their communities! We specifically contributed financially to Camp Schreiber’s incredible tutoring program, which is vital to helping these boys stay on track scholastically through their middle and high school years.
In addition, our own Kenny McRostie has become personally involved with some of the “51-week” extracurricular activities. He has begun to mentor some of the campers and is already providing a positive, male role model to the group. We look forward to establishing a long-term relationship with Camp Schreiber and seeing the positive results of this wonderful organization’s work. Who knows, maybe one of these bright, young men will be a future CANA Advisors team member!
If you have any questions about the CANA Foundation, its initiatives and partnerships, please reach out to Kenny McRostie, CANA Foundation Manager, at kmcrostie@canallc.com or visit our website at http://www.canallc.com/giving-back.