REACH Foundation

The Rotherglen Educating for Advocacy and Creating Hope (REACH) Foundation is an exciting new initiative for the Rotherglen community. At the heart of its conception is the desire to foster awareness within our student body of their role as citizens of the world. The Foundation provides a means for our students, parents and teachers to shape and give direction to our charitable initiatives beginning within our community and reaching further abroad. Our goal is to encourage children to be active citizens by encouraging a sense of gratitude, charity, citizenship, responsibility, leadership and empowerment. The REACH Foundation teaches all our students that even as young people, they can make a difference.

Our goal is to encourage children to be active citizens by encouraging a sense of gratitude, charity, citizenship, responsibility, leadership and empowerment. The REACH Foundation will teach all our students that even as young people, they can make a difference.

Each year, Rotherglen raises thousands of dollars for various charities and initiatives including: the Christmas Wonders campaign to help families in need; the Yellow Fish Road project, Jump Rope for Heart, Terry Fox Walk, Hospital for Sick Children, Katrina Relief, United Way of Oakville, Canadian Diabetes Association and the adopt-a-trail program to name just a few.

In honour of Rotherglen’s 20th anniversary in Oakville, Mark and Eileen Lanigan, founders and directors of the Oakville division of Rotherglen, decided to create an endowment fund with the Community Foundation of Oakville (CFO) in order to create a legacy and to provide a means for the school and its students to make a lasting contribution to the community.

Rotherglen’s new foundation serves as a way to meet our neighbours, build the community and have some fun. Working together, we can help our children, help our community and help ourselves.

The REACH Foundation is another avenue the school can use to meet its mission of educating children and encouraging them to be active citizens and life-long volunteers. As a student led activity, the REACH student board members will decide how the funds will be dispersed annually and will have hands-on learning experiences on how civic responsibility and philanthropy are linked. The 2008/09 academic year is the launch year of the REACH Foundation where goals will be set, a board established and information developed for staff, students, parents and corporate partners. We encourage all members of our community to learn more and to get involved. For more information, please email reach@rotherglen.com

The Community Foundation of Oakville is a special kind of charity with a primary mandate to make it easy, inexpensive and beneficial for generous and caring people to establish their own foundation. It does this by helping them establish endowment funds: pools of principal that are invested in perpetuity to create new income. This income is then granted every year to the charitable causes of their choosing for current community needs. In 2007, the CFO provided more than $1.6 million in grants and disbursements to charities.

For more information about the CFO, please visit: www.thecfo.org