The Halcyon Charitable Trust

Grantor & send record

Foundation

The Halcyon Charitable Trust

Named contact

Col. (Ret.) David Ruiz · President

Location

Tampa, FL

How

Email

Date sent

Not sent

Sent by

—

Amount band

$8.0k–$40k

Package

CFL_Donor_Request_Halcyon_DRAFT.txt

Pipeline stage

meeting

Staff hold — sample draft, not mailed until Send.

SAMPLE DONOR REQUEST. Staff review only until Send is used.

Original request for proposal

The RFP this letter answered — what the grantor asked for, before we wrote anything.

The letter that went out

Exact snapshot of what CFL sent (or would send). This is not the catalog listing — it is the request.

August 22, 2026

Col. (Ret.) David Ruiz
President
The Halcyon Charitable Trust
Tampa, Florida

Dear Colonel Ruiz:

I am writing a donor request, not a federal grant application — a direct ask from one Tampa organization to another. This letter has not been mailed. I wanted you to see the work in our own voice before any package went out.

Who we are

Capital Forge League, Inc. is a Florida 501(c)(3) educational accelerator, EIN 42-2301598, determined effective May 1, 2026. We equip aspiring entrepreneurs — with priority outreach to military veterans and college-age athletes — with financial literacy, entrepreneurial skills, and structured team experience, so they leave with knowledge, credentials, and ventures that belong entirely to them.

Enrollment is open. Outreach may lean toward veterans and athletes; eligibility is not restricted to them. That construction is the one we keep, without exception.

Why this pairing, and not another

Veterans bring operational discipline, planning under constraint, and years of adult work experience forged in service. Athletes bring competitive drive, coachability, and an intimate understanding of what protective gear and rehabilitation actually feel like in use. Each population teaches the other something it cannot teach itself. We build teams before we build ventures. Neither is the mentor and neither is the student.

The product is education. Headline measures are participants served, instruction hours delivered, completion, and assessment gain. Ventures formed are narrative color, never a headline and never a target.

Financial literacy as the spine

Financial literacy runs the length of the program — household finance, capital formation literacy, record-keeping, and the business reality of ownership — taught inside the same projects so participants master both the technical substance and the ownership culture. That is the most defensible, measurable, and fundable activity in the model, and it is the activity this request would underwrite.

We take nothing

Capital Forge League takes no equity, no intellectual property, no royalty, no revenue share, no option, and no economic interest of any kind in any participant venture. The rule is absolute. All work product and any resulting ownership remain solely with the participants who create them. We teach ownership. We do not take it. That separation protects the educational character of the program, keeps judging unconflicted, and is a genuine recruiting advantage against every for-profit accelerator that takes a cut.

The ask

$10,000 from the Halcyon Charitable Trust, restricted to a twelve-month open-enrollment cohort: instruction, mentor hours, and financial-literacy materials for veteran and athlete learning teams operating online, with Tampa as the home base.

If you would rather make an unrestricted education gift, we will receipt it as such and apply it to the same program. Official 501(c)(3) receipts are issued from Super Admin when a gift is logged. This letter is not a receipt, and it has not been mailed.

I am glad to take this to a conversation at your convenience, and equally glad to hear that the timing is wrong.

Respectfully,

Mark Jones
Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Capital Forge League, Inc.

Direct: (813) 436-6988
[email protected]
3030 N Rocky Point Dr W, Suite 150, Tampa, FL 33607
www.capitalforgeleague.com

Response history · append-only

None logged.