2024 Charity of Choice - Champions Empowering Champions!

Every time you purchase raffle tickets at our monthly meetings, ½ of the proceeds is set aside for our Charity of Focus. At the end of the year we will present a donation check. 

CHAMPIONS EMPOWERING CHAMPIONS  - Learn More: https://empoweringchampions.org/  Nearly 80% of foster youth want to attend college.  An estimated 62% enroll in college. Less than 10% of former foster youth graduate from college. The mission of the Champions Empowering Champions organization is to empower college students who have experienced foster care or homelessness to earn a degree and prepare for a career. 

Champions is a unique organization in both our support efforts and our organizational structure.  Champions supports these students through mentoring, skill development, textbooks, educational items, housing scholarships and monthly care packages.  Fortunately, tuition assistance is available in the State of Florida for these students. However, the leading reason homeless and former foster students do not persist is directly correlated to food, and housing insecurity and other educational expenses along with no adult support, safety nets and mentoring. Those needs are addressed through our squad nights, monthly care packages and college and life skill programming. The mentoring focus provides the opportunity for upper class students to share their “lessons learned” in navigating college with new, first-time entering students.  All positions are volunteer, including our Board. Our retention and/or graduation outcomes for Champions is 73.2%, way above the national average of 10%.

In additional to fund raising to directly support the student resources listed, we are also looking for community volunteers to mentor once a month at our squad nights.   Please contact Joe Murray at Murrayj@fau.edu for additional information. 

We continue to support other local charities throughout the year, be it by registering for Walks or attending events that support their amazing causes! Many of our members belong to amazing organizations that mean so very much to them and we do our best to support and help in any way we can throughout the year!