Families, Parks and Recreation

Mayor's Children and Education Initiative

Legacy Trust for Orlando Children

The purpose of The Legacy Trust for Orlando Children is to improve the lives of low-income children and their families within the City of Orlando, by providing them with new or increased access to educational, health, and recreational programs and opportunities, including:

• Pre-kindergarten and parenting programs

• Pediatric health and dental care

• Family economic success initiatives

• Mentoring

• Constructive activities for children and youth during out-of-school hours

• Academic enrichment and tutoring programs

• Programs the effectively help youth transition into jobs and higher education

• The Legacy Trust plans to accomplish its goals by:

1. Developing a model for this strategy in Orlando’s lowest income neighborhood – the Parramore Heritage neighborhood, whose child poverty rate was determined by the 2000 census to be 73%.  This model may then be duplicated in other low-income City neighborhoods.
    
2. Conducting an on-going evaluation of strategies that are developed to determine their effectiveness, by tracking such indicators as neighborhood and/or zip code level child abuse and neglect rates, teen pregnancy rates, high school graduation rates and juvenile arrest rates, and to also measure intermediate objectives such as the rate of insurance coverage among neighborhood children and enrollment in pre-kindergarten, after school and summer programs.
    
3. Thereafter targeting Legacy Trust resources to Orlando neighborhoods whose child poverty rate is greater than 27% and to engage in extensive creative outreach in these neighborhoods to reach as many children as possible with the aim of enrolling all children in these neighborhoods in the aforementioned programs shown to result in positive child health and educational outcomes, thereby improving conditions for a critical mass of children in the target neighborhoods.

The Legacy Trust is administered by the Community Foundation of Central Florida.

Established in 1994 to advance local philanthropy while responding to community needs and supporting charitable organizations, the Community Foundation is a 501 (c)3 charitable organization that manages and invests funds that have been established for local charitable purposes.

The Community Foundation holds over 350 individual, family and corporate funds valued at more than $40 million, and serves the charitable needs of communities throughout the Central Florida region.

By managing and investing donor funds, connecting donors with projects they feel passionate about and enabling donors to make informed decisions through research, the Community Foundation fulfills its mission of "Building Community by Building Philanthropy."