Our Impact
The mission, in the lives it moves.
Five years in Exuma, in the people your support has helped along.
A Graduate. An Artist. A Community.
What is Friends of Exuma’s impact? It is a graduate walking a commencement stage in George Town. It is a young sailor on the water off Elizabeth Harbour. It is an artist’s first show, and a national park protected by generations of Exumians who pushed until it became law. Five years in, these are some of the people and places your support has helped along.
By the Numbers
$2.5M+
directed to Exuma since 2020
16+
community partners
4
focus areas
6
years and counting
From a Rehearsal Hall to a WNBA Stage
In the fall of 2024, a young woman from Great Exuma stood on a WNBA court in Connecticut and raised her trumpet to her lips. Her name is Marvinette “Marvie” Adderley. Seven years earlier, she had been a shy student learning her scales at a Youth Band rehearsal in George Town.
Marvie’s journey did not happen in one step. It took the Exuma Community Youth Band, where she first picked up an instrument. It took LN Coakley High School, where she graduated. It took the Run for Pompey Scholarship, which she received in 2024, and which is now supporting her Hospitality Management studies at Monroe University in New York City.
Marvie returned to Exuma to sit with the Youth Band and tell them what could happen for them, too. Her story is a whole system working, from a first rehearsal to a stage in front of thousands, and home again to teach the next class of players.
The Class of 2026
Jaylen McKenzie, sixteen years old, is heading to London for law school through an accelerated program. She plans to build her career at a Bahamian firm and, one day, to fund a scholarship of her own for other Exumians who want to study law.
Stanley Pitt is going to the University of The Bahamas to study electrical engineering, with plans to continue at UWI toward becoming a family medicine physician.
Winston Barr, Head Boy of his class, is going to UB and then Middle Tennessee State University to study aeronautics. He wants to be a pilot, and he wants to fix planes.
Jeremy Clark is pursuing his commercial pilot’s license, hoping to one day captain international flights.
The Youngest Team to Represent The Bahamas
In Heath, Texas, in the fall of 2024, five young Bahamian sailors lined up at the starting flag of the Optimist World Championships. Three of them were from Great Exuma. All of them were younger than any team The Bahamas had ever sent.
Alvington McKenzie, Tanaj Manos, and Dai Major had come out of the Exuma Sailing Club – founded in 2013 by Dallas and Tamara Knowles, and supported by Friends of Exuma since its earliest years. In Texas, they raced twelve events against a hundred-boat international fleet. They took several top-thirty finishes. Alvington finished thirty-ninth overall in the largest regatta any of them had ever sailed.
A First Solo Show
On a wall in George Town, the paintings of Beatrice Oliver Gould went up for the first time. The room was filled with locals, with visitors, with people who had never before seen a Bahamian’s stories of island life through her own eyes.
Beatrice is a self-taught Bahamian artist. The Exuma Arts Network, one of Friends of Exuma’s earliest partners, invited her to mount her first solo exhibition. The organization does more than showcase artists, though: an eco-art summer camp for children, workshops at LN Coakley High School, a growing presence in the Museums Association of the Caribbean, and a mural project that now sits behind the Arts Network building on Great Exuma.
A Harbour Protected
In the mid-1980s, an Exumian named Basil Minns, a birdwatcher, a fisherman, and a respected member of the community, began asking his neighbours a question no one else was asking: what would happen to Moriah Harbour Cay if no one moved to protect it?
By the late 1990s, his campaign had drawn in students and adults across Exuma, all writing letters to the Prime Minister and to other officials, calling for a national park. In April 2002, that letter-writing campaign became law. Moriah Harbour Cay National Park, roughly 16,800 acres of protected water and coastline, was declared.
Twenty-two years later, in January 2024, the Bahamas National Trust and the Elizabeth Harbour Conservation Partnership completed a state-of-the-art mooring field installation across Elizabeth Harbour and Moriah Harbour Cay National Park. The moorings hold visiting vessels up to sixty feet without tearing up the seagrass beneath them. The Friends of Exuma Harbour Fund was instrumental in making the installation possible.
How We Measure
Friends of Exuma is a volunteer organization with low overhead. Every dollar of your gift is directed to the mission. Every partner is thoroughly vetted before we provide funds, and every partner reports back on how funds were used. Every gift is processed through a U.S.-based accounting firm for tax compliance and reporting.
Friends of Exuma is a registered U.S. 501(c)(3) public charity.
The Work Continues
Every gift, every partner, every year, the mission moves forward. Your support is what keeps it moving.
