The Lazydays Employee Foundation is hoping that after a year in which it had to cancel its biggest charity fundraiser because of COVID-19, its annual golf tournament will be returning this May.
“We’ve been able to bring in over $100,000 for each one of those (golf tournaments) every year,” said Kathy Rainey, president of the Employee Foundation board. “Really successful golf tournaments with the help of our all of our vendors and our manufacturers participating.
“That’s our biggest fundraiser – and pretty much our only one. That’s our primary money event. The other donations all come from employees that sign up for a weekly payroll deduction.
“It was really sad last year that we couldn’t help as many folks because we just didn’t have that big fundraiser,” Rainey said.
The Lazydays Employee Foundation was founded in 2005, and this year marks its 10th golf tournament.
“It’s in the works. We have a date of May 7 (set) and we are in the process of letting our vendors and our manufacturers and everyone notified that we are intending to have it, so fingers crossed and everything works out that we will be able to have it,” Rainey said.
The tournament will take place River Hills Country Club in Valrico, Fla., not far from Lazydays headquarters outside of Tampa.
Florida already has been the site of a couple of RV shows this year, and the annual NTP-STAG Expo was held partly as an in-person event, although with COVID restrictions.
“A couple of us on the board actually attended another (golf) tournament put on by someone else just to see how they handled (COVID), and it really went pretty smoothly,” Rainey said.
The Lazydays Employee Foundation’s mission has been the same since its founding: Helping at-risk youth.
The Tampa chapter is the largest, having been launched in 2005 when Lazydays was a single dealership. As the company grew and added new stores, other Employee Foundation chapters started springing up. The first was in Tucson, Ariz., and Rainey said the company has since added chapters in Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee and another in Florida.
“They’re smaller than us, but they serve their local communities in the same respect we do,” she said.
The Foundation gets requests from a lot of other worthwhile charities, she said, but its focus is always on helping at-risk kids.
“Our initial charity that we began it on was A Kids Place (in Tampa). … They basically have six houses on their property and we sponsor one of those houses where they take in children that are removed from their homes for neglect or abuse and put them in a safe setting. So, if they’re siblings that normally would get separated in foster care, they can stay together until they can either go back home or find a foster care place that can take all of them. There’s five other houses in there sponsored by different charities in the area, but we have the Lazydays house in there.”
Joshua House, another program caring for abused, abandoned and neglected children, was another one of the early charities backed by the Foundation. A more recent one is Bridging Freedom in Tampa.
“They actually rescue young girls from human trafficking and rehabilitate them and work with them and get them hopefully back into society, between therapy and just a safe place to stay,” Rainey said. “That’s our most recent big project.”
