Frequently Asked Questions
Why golf for disadvantaged kids?
Many sports involve participation by closed groups—people who have similar backgrounds, friendships, economics, and a shared subculture. Examples include pickup basketball, soccer teams, and local baseball leagues. Also, sports often stress individual attributes such as physical strength, size, and aggressiveness. This natural selectivity can exclude many young people and desensitize others.
Golf is different; it welcomes players from all backgrounds, ages, and abilities. Reach for the Pars (RFTP) seeks to give disadvantaged kids a way to participate in golf and gain skills, build confidence, and models of mainstream opportunity. It provides an escape from negative social influences and strong positive influences.
How exactly does Reach For The Pars work?
Reach for the Pars collects and distributes new surplus golf equipment, clothing, and assistance to disadvantaged youth with interest in the game. This offers underprivileged boys and girls a chance to overcome financial barriers and develop the interest they have already expressed in golf, meet new people who share that interest, and develop new skills and confidence. Reach For The Pars works with established programs like Youth On Course (a Northern California Golf Association non-profit organization), The First Tee, and K-12
schools, adding the key feature of a focus on disadvantaged youth. We are building relationships with golf equipment and apparel manufactures to donate surplus equipment, clothing, and shoes. We fit that equipment to individuals and participate in clinics that teach golf techniques as well as etiquette and the core values inherent in golf; honesty, integrity, sportsmanship, respect, confidence, respect, responsibility, courtesy, judgment, and perseverance. We will use individual contact and monitoring to help solve the inevitable problems of some disadvantaged participants in this new venture.
What is RFTP's primary purpose?
We are seeking to help disadvantaged boys and girls combat prejudices and gain a foothold in mainstream society, through facilitating their participation in golf as a cross-cultural growth experience and builder of higher aspirations.
What is RFTP's long term vision and goal?
We aim to create first a localized model and then leverage its success into gradual growth into a widely used network of such local programs across California and beyond. Substantial, scalable quality-of-life gains to participants and society will be the key goal. To gauge success, we envision developing the ability to track the participants during their high school years within the program and later as they move into adult life. Planned metrics include rate of program growth, retention rate, length of participation, continuation of golf as a subsequent activity, development of new friendships, self-reported life aspirations, and evidence of success beyond their peers and breaking of closed boundaries.
How does RFTP relate to golf organizations?
This program is endorsed by Youth On Course. Their purposes are to teach golf and its social gains to young people and to encourage lifelong golf interest. They provide discounted greens fees to member participants. We contribute and add to those goals through our focus on disadvantaged youth and golf’s potential for their personal growth, breaking of social barriers, and helping them into the mainstream of society.
How does this role help the kids and their families?
The statistics on life in underprivileged families and communities are tragic. Far too many young people—and their families—lack money, enough food, safe surroundings, and enough peers who are good influences. The worst aspect is the scarcity of possibilities and expectations for success in life. Too often this leads to crime and gang involvement and even prison. This is a shameful aspect of our society, a huge loss in human potential, and we want to help overcome it.
Through involvement in youth golf, kids are exposed to a much broader and more positive group of people who can become friends and models for self-improvement and growth. This exposure is often a catalyst for belief in broader personal opportunities and motivation to work toward change. Golf’s ability to turn virtually any novice’s self-doubts into competence and self-confidence that can then spill over into other aspects of their life.
What is the value of this program to society?
Our core proposition: This program shows underprivileged kids a diverse societal group (golfers) whose life models would broaden the participants’ experiences, reduce class isolation, use/develop skills and confidence, and create an incentive to stay in school and have real aspirations toward their own advancement in society. We hope to change lives, moving young people from poverty’s closed cycle into the world of better models, reduced barriers, new skills, advantages, and possibilities.
How will this help kids afford to play regularly?
Disadvantaged kids face many obstacles to success in life. This program must provide solutions to problems such as equipment cost, playing fees, and getting to the courses. This includes during AND after they leave the program. The program will also provide links to , special greens fee rates, and local public transportation options. The program managers will also monitor and reach out to all participants regularly to provide encouragement, solve problems, clarify program features, and provide special help as needed.
How do you describe the target youth group?
We plan to impose no limitation on participation by any disadvantaged boy or girl in each target community. Boys and girls ages 7-18 are the primary user group and school attendance may be a requirement.
How will RFTP equipment and help be distributed?
Equipment will be distributed based on prove need, participation, and incentives. Completion of clinics, demonstration of core values, practice & improvement, and school attendance & grades improvement will be some of the factors determining and motivating awards by RFTP. Equipment, gear, and apparel will be distributed on a graduated value basis, with participants earning higher value awards through continued participation in the programs.
Why should RFTP be a part of donors portfolios?
Equipment manufacturers, golf course operators, golf-related membership groups, and others already give substantial support to other golf-for-youth initiatives, but this neglects the needs of disadvantaged kids. Our role is to put youth golf into a broader context, based on its value in helping lift those young people out of often dead-end lives, dangers, societal segregation, and public cost, and into more productive and satisfying lives.
There are many good initiatives in sports for kids, and major donors often feel beset with too many requests and too much effort. RFTP adds an important factor for donors: A socially conscious and uplifting program focus, targeted at disadvantaged youth
and their families, and based on helping move them out of an often cloudy and pessimistic future and into a good one beyond their expectations. The potential advantages to the participants as well as the whole society are extreme—turning societal problems and costs into positive contributions to individual growth and society.
What is RFTP's legal and financial structure?
Reach For The Pars is a California nonprofit corporation, registered under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code. It operates independently, with no legal or financial ties to any other organizations or private interests.
Who are its directors and key staff?
Its board of directors is led by Perry Shustack, a dedicated golfer, father, community advocate, and longtime technology industry marketing
expert for several international providers of IT equipment, software, and services. The founding board includes interested acquaintances and like-minded relatives. As the organization grows, the board will evolve by phasing out some interim members and adding major industry figures and sponsors as well as cross-memberships with members of related boards.
What is RFTP's plan for rollout and growth?
We can't do everything at once. The organization is starting small. Geographically it is to be at first very limited to the San Francisco region’s East Bay. Once that is consolidated we will expand into adjacent areas around the Bay, with a later stage to involve gradual introduction in other areas of the state.
We have to focus first on what we can do to build a managerial foundation and test acceptance in some initial communities. Initial priorities
will be relationship building, equipment and services agreements, and startup funding for mini-market testing and staffing. The success of these initial steps will lead to program refinement, marketing, and launch in successively broader markets.