"Grey Oaks Cares represents our club at its very best: members and staff united by a shared sense of responsibility and service." That's board chair Mary Perry describing what happened between February 1 and February 6, when Grey Oaks Country Club turned its ordinary weekly rhythm of pickleball courts, bocce lanes, card tables, and tee times into a six-day fundraising push that closed out at more than $3.8 million for 70 Collier County nonprofits.
The number that matters more than the total, though, is what came before it. A year earlier, the same initiative was a single-day golf tournament. It raised $750,000. This year it became six days of golf, pickleball, bocce, tennis, cycling, mahjong, canasta, and trivia, and the total grew roughly five times over. That kind of jump doesn't usually come from a bigger ask or a slicker campaign. It comes from an organization discovering that it already had the machinery for this sitting in plain sight, doing something else every week of the season.
The Infrastructure Was Already There
Grey Oaks didn't build anything new to raise $3.8 million. It has long run a packed social calendar of themed parties, wine tastings, and organized dining nights, the kind of programming that fills a private club's weekly rhythm regardless of any charitable goal. It also runs a competitive recreational scene entirely apart from philanthropy. The club hosted its second annual Pickleball Open in 2026, a standalone tournament that draws players from across Southwest Florida for round robin play and bracket finals. None of that was invented for Grey Oaks Cares. It was already running.
What changed in year two was the decision to point those existing channels at a shared goal instead of running the giving campaign as a separate, bolted-on event. A golf tournament is one audience and one mechanism. A week that includes bocce competitions, tennis drills with the pros, an eight-mile cycling ride around the community loop, and card games at the mahjong and canasta tables reaches members who were never going to show up for a golf outing in the first place. Five times the money didn't require five times the effort. It required using five times as many rooms members were already walking into.
Six Days, Mapped
The Week of Giving broke down into a specific sequence of activities, each one functioning as its own small fundraiser rather than a single central ask:
- Pickleball and bocce competitions
- Tennis drills with the club's pros
- An off-court trivia contest
- An eight-mile cycling ride around the Grey Oaks community loop
- Mahjong and canasta events
- A golf tournament raising money through donations, raffles, and live auctions
- The second annual Grey Oaks Cares dinner and charity event
Stacking these together rather than isolating one flagship event meant the campaign could collect smaller contributions across a much wider set of members throughout the week, instead of depending on one large turnout on one Saturday.
Where the Week's Money Actually Went
The 70 beneficiaries named as this year's primary recipients span a range of needs across Collier County, from food security to housing to early childhood education:
| Cause Area | Organization |
|---|---|
| Food security | Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida, St. Matthew's House |
| Family and community support | Grace Place, Guadalupe Center |
| Housing | Habitat for Humanity of Collier County, Warrior Homes of Collier County |
| Health access | Neighborhood Health Clinic |
| Early education | Pathways Early Education Center of Immokalee |
| Youth and family services | Naples Children's Foundation |
| Safety and shelter | The Shelter for Abused Women and Children |
| Conservation and wildlife | Naples Zoo |
The spread matters. This wasn't a single check written to a single cause. It was distributed across categories that don't usually share a fundraising campaign, which is only possible when the campaign itself is broad enough to touch that many different member interests over six days instead of one afternoon.
What This Says About Life Inside the Gates
General manager Don Emery framed the effort as a matter of daily operating philosophy rather than a one-off event: "At Grey Oaks Country Club, stewardship, generosity and community guide how we operate." That statement only carries weight if the numbers back it up, and in this case they do. Grey Oaks Cares is two years old. In its first year, it was a single golf tournament that hit $750,000. In its second, it became a structured, multi-format week that surpassed its own fundraising goal and reached $3.8 million across 70 organizations, according to reporting from the Naples Press and the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce.
That trajectory says something specific about how a private club community functions once its social calendar reaches a certain density. Grey Oaks already had the pieces: a wellness and recreation program running dozens of classes a week, a competitive pickleball and tennis scene active enough to support its own standalone tournament, and a dining and events calendar built to keep members engaged year-round. None of that existed for charitable purposes. It existed because that's what a private club community runs on. Grey Oaks Cares is what happens when that existing rhythm gets redirected, even briefly, toward causes outside the gates.
It also suggests the ceiling for next year isn't obvious yet. A campaign that multiplied by five in its second year, while adding categories of activity rather than replacing them, hasn't shown where its growth actually slows. Whatever the total looks like next February, the courts, tables, and cycling loop it will be built on are already in place.
If you live in Grey Oaks and want to compare notes on this year's Week of Giving, or you're curious how the community's calendar has evolved since Grey Oaks Cares started two years ago, The Resop Team is always glad to talk about what makes this neighborhood run.
