During Grey Oaks Cares' Week of Giving this past February, temperatures at the club's pickleball courts dropped into the high 20s, a chill that almost never touches this stretch of central Naples. Members showed up anyway. Paddles in hand, coffee steaming, they played through the cold for a single afternoon of charity pickleball that raised more than $85,000. That single afternoon, from one recreational subgroup inside one gated community, pulled in more than 11 percent of what the club's entire single-day golf tournament raised the year before.
That comparison is the real story behind Grey Oaks Cares, the club's philanthropic initiative that closed its second year this past February having raised more than $3.8 million for 70 Collier County nonprofits during a six-day Week of Giving held February 1 through 6, 2026. The obvious headline is the dollar figure. The more useful one, for anyone trying to understand how this community actually works, is what changed structurally between year one and year two. The club didn't ask the same donors to give more. It built more ways to give, and each one turned out to carry its own weight.
One Day, One Tournament
Grey Oaks Cares launched in 2025 as a single-day golf tournament, organized by a volunteer committee of Donna Burke, Jeff Diermeier, Bryan Gentry, Steve Granger, Jim and Kim Hummer, and Ann McAloon. It raised $750,000 for 50 local charities, including Grace Place, Guadalupe Center, Habitat for Humanity of Collier County, Pathways Early Education Center of Immokalee, Providence House, St. Matthew's House, STARability Foundation, The Shelter for Abused Women, and Warrior Homes of Collier County. General manager Don Emery called the number a starting point, and set a target for year two: raise over $1 million.
That target was modest by design. A single-day tournament has a natural ceiling. It requires one day, one format, and a member base willing to golf. Everyone else in the club, the tennis players, the pickleball regulars, the mahjong table, was a spectator to the giving rather than a participant in it.
Six Days, Not One
Year two abandoned the single-format model entirely. The 2026 Week of Giving spread the ask across the club's actual recreational calendar:
- Pickleball and bocce competitions
- Tennis drills with the club pros
- An off-court trivia contest
- An eight-mile cycling ride around the Grey Oaks community loop
- Mahjong and canasta events
- A golf tournament with donations, raffles, and live auctions
- The second annual Grey Oaks Cares dinner and charity event
Board chair Mary Perry called the week a reflection of "members and staff united by a shared sense of responsibility and service," and the total backs that up in a way a single tournament never could have. The nonprofit count grew too, from 50 organizations in year one to 70 in year two, but that 40 percent increase in reach is dwarfed by the more than fivefold increase in dollars raised. The average dollar amount reaching each nonprofit partner rose from roughly $15,000 in 2025 to more than $54,000 in 2026. The club didn't just spread the giving thinner across more causes. It went deeper with each one.
The Math Nobody Advertised
Don Emery's own goal for year two, stated publicly in 2025, was to clear $1 million. The club nearly quadrupled that target. The gap between the stated ambition and the actual result is the clearest evidence that the format change, not a sudden surge in member generosity, drove the number. Members didn't wake up in February 2026 feeling five times more charitable than they did in 2025. They were simply given five or six different doors to walk through instead of one, and each door pulled in a crowd that the golf tournament alone never reached.
The pickleball afternoon is the cleanest proof of this. It was one activity, run over a few cold hours, aimed at a subset of the membership that plays a sport with no obvious overlap to golf. And it alone generated more than a tenth of the prior year's entire fundraising total. Multiply that kind of standalone performance across seven distinct formats, each drawing a different slice of the membership, and a $3.8 million week stops looking like a fluke and starts looking like arithmetic.
Who Actually Gets the Check
The money moves. In 2026, Pathways Early Education Center of Immokalee and the Guadalupe Center are using their share of Grey Oaks Cares funding to expand facilities and serve more children, a detail that matters more to residents than the topline number does. Other 2026 beneficiaries include Grace Place, Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida, Naples Children's Foundation, Naples Zoo, Neighborhood Health Clinic, St. Matthew's House, The Shelter for Abused Women and Children, and Warrior Homes of Collier County, alongside Habitat for Humanity of Collier County and dozens of smaller organizations across the county.
The initiative is run by a volunteer committee working alongside club leadership, and that structure is deliberate. When Grey Oaks Cares launched in 2025, organizers were explicit that the committee's work ensured 100 percent of funds raised went directly to the nonprofits. The racquets department extended that same model into its own event, with staff members Margie Hurwich, Mary Jo Sulzman, and Andy Krone underwriting the in-house costs of the pickleball fundraiser so none of the proceeds were absorbed by overhead.
That detail explains why fragmenting the giving across seven separate events didn't dilute the total the way you might expect. Each event was built to stand on its own financially, so adding a cycling ride or a trivia night didn't create new administrative drag. It just created a new, self-funded channel for money to flow through.
A Club That Keeps Finding Reasons to Show Up
The Week of Giving wasn't an isolated flash of community spirit either. In March 2026, the Bryan Brothers, the most decorated doubles team in tennis history and International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees, headlined a Tennis Legends exhibition at Grey Oaks, joined by fellow legends Tom Gullikson, Mikael Pernfors, Emilio Sánchez, and Jesse Witten alongside the club's own Sergi Micó Fenollar. Members who wanted it could book clinics and lunch with the group beforehand. It is one more data point in a broader pattern: this is a club where the calendar itself, golf, tennis, pickleball, cards, cycling, keeps generating occasions for members to show up and participate, and Grey Oaks Cares simply gave that existing rhythm a charitable outlet.
For residents who already call Grey Oaks home, the number that matters isn't $3.8 million in isolation. It's the fact that the club figured out, in a single year, that the fastest way to grow a philanthropic effort wasn't to ask the same golfers to write bigger checks. It was to meet every member where they already spend their time, on the pickleball court, at the mahjong table, on the cycling loop, and let each of those spaces become its own small engine for giving.
You can find more detail on Grey Oaks Cares and the club's full calendar at greyoakscc.com. Coverage of the 2026 Week of Giving totals also ran in the Naples Press and Gulfshore Business.
If you're already part of this community and want to talk about what's happening on the real estate side of Grey Oaks, or you're watching from outside and curious what daily life here actually looks like beyond the gates, Taranto Team knows this neighborhood the way a resident does, not just as a listing. Schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk.
