April 2025 Update
This is the first of what we hope will be a monthly up date of the goings on at the foundation. That is your foundation, the Julia Coey Memorial Foundation, the little foundation that could!
As in every organization a lot goes on behind the scenes and our volunteers are mostly unsung and they like it that way. Running a foundation is a lot of work, much to our ongoing surprise.
For example we had to update and amend our By-laws to comply with the Ontario Non-profit Act of 2010. This particular exercise took a lot of time. We are not complaining because every non-profit in Ontario had to do it. We were lucky in that we had only recently approved our original by-laws and so we were pretty much in compliance. Jim worked on a set of by-laws for another non-profit that had not been looked at since the 1950’s.
At our board meeting on March 20th, we voted to donate to 3 charities with educational components. You will recall that we have a three year plan for our donations and the 3rd year we had determined was to be educational. Scholarships and bursaries are a bit complicated to manage so we set our disbursements committee the difficult task of finding worthy charities with an educational component. We also invited you to submit suggested charities of your choice.
Erin and Lesley deliberated long and hard and presented the board with a list of worthy candidates and the board of directors choose three charities. Each of these very deserving charities will receive $2000.00 in 2025 thanks to you our very generous donors.
Ontario Parks Association Foundation
The Ontario Parks Association Foundation provides scholarships and bursaries to qualified students who are pursuing post-secondary in Parks management, horticulture, landscaping, conservation or environmental resource management.
Green Thumbs.
This non-profit runs school garden programmes that provide all ages and all backgrounds with a variety of settings such as native plantings, meadow ecosystems, native tree species and planting and tending their own gardens.
Ontario Nature Youth Summit.
The foundation’s donation will provide funding for disadvantaged youth to attend the annual Ontario Biodiversity Youth Summit at Trent University in Peterborough. The aim is to bring people together to build a future where biodiversity is valued and conserved and to help our future citizens live in harmony with nature.
On Friday 28th of March some of the board met at the Barrie Food bank to deliver a cheque for $2000.00. The need for donations and food is shockingly great. Karen Shuh, the C.E.O., told us that they average 400 new clients per month.
You can reach us at info@juliasfoundation.org or jim@juliasfoundation.org if you have any comments. We love hearing from you especially about your Jaunting for Julia forays.
Don’t forget it is easy to donate by eTransfer to info@juliasfoundation.org
Founding board members Terri and Lesley present another donation to the Barrie Food Bank.