{"id":113071,"date":"2026-01-10T12:34:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T12:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/113071\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T12:34:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T12:34:06","slug":"cape-corals-art-festival-funds-vital-community-support-initiatives-lee-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/113071\/","title":{"rendered":"Cape Coral&#8217;s art festival funds vital community support initiatives | Lee County"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hundreds of artists and craftsmen from around the world are expected to gather in Cape Coral this weekend for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.winknews.com\/news\/lee\/cape-coral-parkway-transforms-for-national-art-festival\/article_5aa1980a-24d3-4f0d-b896-c8be80bafa3c.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Cape Coral Art Festival<\/a>. The event not only showcases art but also supports the Rotary Club\u00a0of Cape Coral, a nonprofit organization.<\/p>\n<p>The festival serves as the club&#8217;s biggest fundraiser of the year, with all proceeds going toward community initiatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The funds raised helped the Guiding Grace Family Support Network.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are Guiding Grace Family Support Network, and our mission is to dismantle the barriers that keep families from stability,&#8221; said Meghan DeLuca, the executive director.<\/p>\n<p>The organization provides resources to families in need, like food, clothing, hygiene products, and affordable housing. But to do so, they need money.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s when the Rotary Club stepped up.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are so very grateful to the Rotary Club, through its foundation,&#8221; said DeLuca. &#8220;The idea that they believed in what we do here, so much that they offered us a grant as an organization, was over and above and beyond anything that I truly imagined.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Rotary Club Foundation trustee, Amy Rouskey, emphasized the importance of the festival.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The art festival is our biggest fundraiser of the entire year,&#8221; said Rouskey. &#8220;All the money that we raise at that festival goes directly back into the community.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The funds have supported various projects, including the installation of\u00a0, providing dictionaries to every third-grader in Lee County, and donating over 1,000 books and bibs to Cape Coral Hospital for newborns.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Every year we give to the Cape Coral Caring Center, to Rotary Park,&#8221; said Rouskey. &#8220;We give scholarships to Cape Coral residents, to the students, to FGCU, FSW, and soon they&#8217;ll be giving a lot of scholarships to the trade schools. We also help out Cape Coral High School. We built a garden for them. We also have the Rotary Community Garden. The art festival funds pretty much everything that we do,&#8221; Rouskey said.<\/p>\n<p>The festival raises more than $100,000 annually, thanks to the participating artists. It&#8217;s all given back to the community by the club.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the principle of Rotary,&#8221; said Rouskey.<\/p>\n<p>DeLuca shared how the Rotary Club inspired her work.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I joined the Rotary Club of Cape Coral as a personal mission because our motto is service above self, and it gave me an outlet for me to serve,&#8221; said DeLuca. &#8220;We are deeply, deeply grateful to Rotary for believing in our mission and in the families we serve right here in our community.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Rotary Club of Cape Coral is preparing for what they anticipate to be a successful year at their biggest fundraiser this weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hundreds of artists and craftsmen from around the world are expected to gather in Cape Coral this weekend&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,57513,211,2953,38541,210,28,356,26469,57512],"class_list":{"0":"post-113071","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cape-coral","8":"tag-cape-coral","9":"tag-cape-coral-caring-center","10":"tag-cape-coral-headlines","11":"tag-cape-coral-high-school","12":"tag-cape-coral-hospital","13":"tag-cape-coral-news","14":"tag-florida","15":"tag-lee-county","16":"tag-rotary-club","17":"tag-rotary-club-foundation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}