SPORTS Academy St. Lucia was on Thursday the latest recipient of a donation of EC$5000.00 from the Oliver Gobat Sports Foundation to help them with their various sporting disciplines.
The brief cheque presentation was made by General Manager of Cap Maison Ross Stevenson to a young member of the academy.
Sue Dyson, an executive member of the Academy thanked Cap Maison for their “timely” financial assistance. She said the funding will go a long way in helping the Academy realize some of its sporting initiatives for 2016. At present the Academy is staging a month-long camp in a number of sporting disciplines for well over 30 athletes between the ages of 7 to 16 at the Gros Islet Primary School.
The Oliver Gobat Sports Foundation was founded ten months ago. It is named after Oliver Gobat, a keen sportsman who was murdered at Cap Estate more than two years ago.
Stevenson said the fund is generated through events put on both here in St. Lucia and in the United Kingdom and to date has disbursed $85,000.00 to sports men and women and youth in St. Lucia.
He said: “We believe that sports is a great platform and framework to provide motivation, discipline and objectives for the young children of St. Lucia to obtain greater things both in sports and academics. I think with the disciplines that sports gives you, you have a better focus on the goals that you want to achieve. And by giving money to individual athletes for coaching benefits, for equipment, we hope that makes the process easier, simpler and benefits the youth of St. Lucia”.
Stevenson said the Foundation held a golf day four months ago which was fully subscribed and raised EC$57,000.00. Then there was a similar event in the UK for Gobat’s friends and colleagues and that contributed to the funds as well.
He added: “We will continue to do fund-raisers similar to that. There’s a Facebook page as well where people can donate into that as well. And we are working on being a non-profit charitable organization so we can strengthen our cause.