Community Foundation Tampa Bay grants support record number of nonprofits

For Belinda Leto and Celina Saunders, one good deed has led to another 10,000 and counting. 

The co-founders of Tampa nonprofit Celebrate Birthdays’ latest charitable effort is the Youth Community Closet, a mobile boutique that will travel to Title 1 elementary schools in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties to deliver clothes, socks, shoes, and undergarments to children in need. It is one of 88 nonprofit programs Community Foundation Tampa Bay awarded more than $2.5 million combined in competitive grants in 2026, a record year for the program. 

The regional grantmaking charity received 426 applications for funding in this year’s cycle, an increase of more than 17 percent from 2025 and another high mark for the program. In a press release, Community Foundation Tampa Bay President and CEO Marlene Spalten says the application “reflected a growing need across our region, particularly for programs focused on basic needs such as housing, food security, clothing, healthcare, and other essential services.” 

Seeing a need and meeting it

For Leto and Saunders, charitable acts tend to follow a pattern. Volunteering with one program, they come face-to-face with another community need and launch a new initiative to meet it. 

Several years ago, the best friends were volunteers for their local church’s “angel tree” program, delivering Christmas gifts and holiday cheer to children from low-income families. Their last stop one day was a grandmother in her 70s caring for three grandchildren under 8 while their mother was incarcerated. As Leto and Saunders got ready to leave, the grandmother asked whether there was a local program that could give her grandson a birthday party and cake when he turned eight the next month, because she didn’t have the means. They checked around and found nothing. In 2019, they founded Celebrate Birthdays to fill the gap. 

For seven years, they’ve traveled to clubhouses, classrooms, and community centers across the Bay Area to bring brighter birthdays to foster children, children facing terminal and serious illnesses, and kids from low-income communities and Title 1schools. Along the way, they’ve added programs like Birthday in a Box and Celebrate Reading, which lets kids pick out a birthday book and handmade bookmark. They also noticed a troubling trend.

“We get so many requests for basic items,” Leto says. “I’m thinking kids are going to ask for Nikes or an Xbox for their birthday, something above and beyond. A lot of them are asking for socks or clothes. They don’t have the basics. We keep seeing it over and over and over, and it keeps breaking my heart. No child should ever have to ask for this for their birthday. They should get something they want.”

With that, the Youth Community Closet was born. 

“We’re already out there in the community,” Leto says. “We’re out there, and we have working relationships with Title 1 and transformation schools through our classroom birthday program and our Celebrate Reading program. If we’re doing all this already, why don’t we just bring clothes to the children as well?”

The $30,000 Community Foundation grant will help purchase a step van and retrofit it as a mobile boutique complete with shelving, racks, and displays. It’s one of several grants for mobile programs that get around the transportation barriers many struggling people and vulnerable populations face by bringing their services into the community. 

Lions World Vision Institute offers mobile vision screenings. ShowerUp provides mobile shower services for the homeless. 360 Eats operates a food truck with an on-board kitchen that serves meals at five sites in mid and north Pinellas County. The CommUnity Kitchen provides free, chef-prepared meals to residents in a South St. Petersburg food desert. Clearwater nonprofit Good Neighbors is launching a mobile grocery service. Bess the Book Bus travels to local schools and summer camps loaded with free books for home and classroom libraries. 

Growing presence on Nature Coast

In addition to the record numbers of applications and grants, 2026 saw a surge in applications from nonprofits in the northern reaches of Community Foundation Tampa Bay’s coverage area, the Nature Coast counties of Pasco, Citrus, and Hernando, Community Foundation Vice President, Community Impact Brandi Sanchez says.

“We saw a lot more applications from those areas than in the past,” Sanchez says. “More organizations are starting to learn about Community Foundation.”

In the wake of the 2024 hurricanes, Community Foundation’s critical needs list emerged as a valuable resource for nonprofits in those northern counties, providing funding to support their community response efforts and their own recovery from storm damage. 

“I think that showed organizations our willingness to be there when times are tough,” Sanchez says. “It also lets them know we have this competitive grant process.”

Citrus County nonprofit Save Crystal River was a first-time grant applicant and recipient in 2026. The grassroots, all-volunteer environmental group received $55,000 for its ongoing work to clean, restore, and protect first-magnitude King Spring, Kings Bay, and Crystal River. 

“This project really stood out to us,” Sanchez says. “It blended environmental resiliency and sustainability with economic opportunity, which are two of our five focus areas. It helps the community understand how the environment impacts the economy.”

Save Crystal River formed in 2012 as a spin-off of the Kings Bay Rotary Club and used a $1.6 million appropriation from the Florida Legislature as seed money to start the restoration project. The nonprofit’s contracted aquatic restoration firm, Sea & Shoreline, removed decades of accumulated muck from Kings Bay to reach the sandy bottom and unclog spring vents. The firm’s biologists then planted seagrass. 

The current phase of the yearslong project includes installing a hybrid reef system to protect the barrier islands in Kings Bay, says Save Crystal River board member Jill-Anne Beary. Beary joined the nonprofit in August 2025 and immediately became its grant writer. The Community Foundation grant was the first grant application she’d ever written.

 “I feel strongly about the work we’re doing,” she says. “That made it easier to write about. But I didn’t know how to put it into a grant form. The Community Foundation helped me understand how to take what I know and feel and put it in a grant format. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the information and support they gave me. It was a very good experience. They gave me confidence. Because of them, I just submitted my first federal grant.”

Second-effort success

Sanchez says every nonprofit that misses out on grant funding is offered a 30-minute feedback call to go over what the Community Foundation looks for in an application and how to strengthen their proposals. She says several organizations that took that call were successful this time around. Pasco County’s Sarah Vande Berg Tennis Foundation is one of them.

“Community Foundation met with us after last year to tell us we were so close and guide us through the process,” Executive Director Nick Walton says. “That call probably helped us get other grants as well. You can’t really measure that. But that feedback was so important.”

Established in memory of a Zephyrhills High graduate and tennis standout who died in a 2015 car crash, the nonprofit partners with Title 1 schools in Pasco County to offer a free after-school tennis and educational outreach program for students in grades 1-12  from low-income households. During summer break, the nonprofit brings its program to free and subsidized summer camps. Walton says the organization reached 60 kids its first year. That rose to 120, then 350, then 450, and now 650.

“We’re in the youth development space using tennis as the hook to get kids involved,” Walton says. “We go to schools to teach kids a new skill. But really our focus is SEL — social, emotional learning. We’re trying to teach them communication, teamwork, integrity. Sure, they’re gonna learn the forehand and backhand volleys and have fun doing it. But our goal is to develop youth holistically and give them skills that will help them in life. Maybe there will be kids who get a scholarship through tennis. But our goal is to get all the kids to college by teaching them other, less tangible skills that will get them through college and through life.”

High school students in the program become ambassadors who serve as junior coaches, mentor younger students, earn volunteer hours, and develop a track record of community involvement they can highlight on a college or scholarship application.

The $20,000 Community Foundation grant will support the after-school program’s continued growth. 

“Community Foundation Tampa Bay’s support is more than just a financial driver; it is a stamp of approval that signals to future donors and foundations that the Sarah Vande Berg Tennis Foundation is making a real, lasting impact in the Tampa Bay community,” Walton says.

Looking ahead

Community Foundation Tampa Bay’s competitive grant cycle typically opens in December or early January. Competitive grants fund programs in five focus areas: economic opportunity, environmental resiliency and sustainability, physical health and mental wellbeing, quality child and youth education, and vibrant and engaged communities.

“The competitive grant process is our way of learning about nonprofit organizations’ needs and innovative projects and what’s going on in the communities we serve,” Sanchez says. 

For more information, go to Community Foundation Tampa Bay competitive grants, Celebrate Birthdays, Save Crystal River, and Sarah Vande Berg Tennis Foundation

This story is produced through an underwriting agreement between Community Foundation Tampa Bay and 83 Degrees