On May 17, The Contributor participated in this year’s Helper Grant Award Ceremony at Bridgestone Arena. The Contributor was invited to accept a grant from the Predators Foundation that would help families with transportation. While The Contributor is not a family provider, we increasingly are approached by parents who are seeking immediate access to income or want to supplement their income as they transition out of homelessness. In addition, many people living on the streets have kids who are not with them. They’re parents who try their best to get back on their feet and reunite with their children.
We sat down with Rebecca King, vice president of community relations and executive director of the Nashville Predators Foundation to learn more about the organization and its approach to community giving.
Could you give us a brief overview of the Predators Foundation?
The Predators Foundation is housed under the Nashville Predators organization, and we raise money for youth and families. We spend our whole year raising the money through events and auctions that then goes into our grants program. This enables us to fund organizations in our community through our grant cycle.
In addition to the grant cycle, our foundation has a pediatric cancer fund. We build a playground every year with KaBOOM! We contribute $100,000 a year to the AMEND Together program to teach young men how to be good men. It’s part of the YWCA and its domestic violence program. And then we do a lot of programming with our players. We figure out where their passions are and what they’re interested in, and we create programs that bring awareness and financial gain to these nonprofits to help them do the great work that they’re doing.
The Contributor is a 2023 recipient of the Helper Grants. What are the Helper Grants and how big has your contribution been to the community through the Helper Grants?
Our grants program is our largest annual allocation to the nonprofit community. We have one grant cycle. Last May we distributed $800,000 in one day. We had 172 nonprofits show up and collect a check. We, as an organization, decided we don’t know what’s best for kids in schools, for example. But we should raise money and then help organizations that are helping kids in schools. We can be that mechanism to fundraise, and so we do that through the grants program. Our former president of the Preds Foundation, his name is Gerry Helper. He recently retired. His name is so appropriate for the program that we renamed it Helper Grants, after him. He has been with the organization since inception and started the foundation.
Other than providing support dollars, what type of collaborations do you like to enter with nonprofit organizations?
We have a variety [of collaborations], and again, a lot of them spur from the interest of our players. We have one player really interested in animal rescue and so, every year, we help him raise money through Wags and Walks Nashville through creating a dog club and through having our fans support the cause that he’s passionate about. We have a close partnership with children’s hospital, and we annually raise money for their pediatric cancer fund. We’ve been doing that since 2013. That was started by two of our players, Pekka Rinne and Shea Weber, who are both no longer playing. We wanted to create a legacy program. When they were done playing hockey this kept on going, creating amazing things in the community because of them and because of their desire to help and give back to the community. We have hundreds of partnerships, but I think those are two of our big ones.
How much do the Predators players get involved with the Foundation?
We always say, if you want to be an employee of the Nashville Predators or even if you want to be a player of the Nashville Predators, you have to be a part of the community. It’s who we are. It’s part of the DNA and fiber as an employee. When new players come in or when players come up from the minor league, we meet with them and figure out where their interests are because if we try to align them with something that’s not really a passion project for them, it’s not going to be as successful.
We have one player who is no longer with the Preds, but his program continues – P. K. Subban. He wanted to create a program that brought together youth and police officers and so we created the Blue-line Buddies. At every home game we have a police officer and their guest meet up with a “Big” and a “Little” from Big Brothers Big Sisters. They get to meet a player before the game; they’re given a T-shirt and some goodies; they get to go eat dinner together and have conversation and then they go and watch the hockey game together. They show up as strangers and then they leave as friends and usually keep in touch after the game. P.K. hasn’t played here in probably three to four years, but it was so well received by the police officers and also the youth organizations that we partnered with that it was something we wanted to continue. It also created a legacy for P.K. when he recently retired. He can look back and see that this program is still going on thanks to his involvement when he was a player here. We have several players who adopt kids at Christmas, deliver turkeys, and some guys spend a lot of money and donate that way. Other players give a lot of their time. They love to go to the children’s hospital or go to youth hockey clinics and inspire new young hockey players. All of our guys do something, it just depends on where their interests are.
We at The Contributor were really excited to receive a grant from The Predators Foundation this year for the first time…
Reading your grant, you would not think The Contributor would really make sense with [our focus on] families. But we always tell nonprofits that inquire about applying for grants is that it’s not their mission that we read. It’s how they want to spend the money. If the money [they request] then ties back to helping kids and parents, then there is this opportunity.
What else would you like for Nashvillians to know about the work at the Predators Foundation?
The important thing we’d like for people to know is that we’re not given money at the start of the year and then spend the rest of the year distributing it. We put on fundraisers like every other organization. We have a golf tournament; we have a clay shoot; we have a bowling tournament; we have a gala; we have a wine tasting; we have a beer festival; we have a fishing tournament. So all of these events engage our fans, engage the community, and through those events is how we raise the money that we distribute. We are very careful who we give it to, because we work so hard to raise it and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into these events and fundraisers. Our grant cycle is open. It opened Oct. 2 and closes in January. We welcome interested organizations to apply.
When people reach out to us and want to do all these things with us, we always tell them, the first way for us to be introduced to what you do is through the grant program because we get so much valuable information from the application. And then from there, the relationship starts. Some organizations we’ve done so many things with are because of that very first step and partnering with us.