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Our mission is to inspire lifelong interest and encouragement in opera and classical music, and to promote music education for students, including financial support.
Proud sponsor of the Harold S. Schwartz Music Scholarship Program
$560,000 thus far ... we depend on your generosity! (Learn more)
Since it's beginning, the Opera Club of The Villages has awarded more than $560,000 in scholarships to high school students in Lake, Marion & Sumter Counties Florida. Your donations help support these students as they follow their lifelong musical journeys. Students benefit from your generous gifts, and as a registered 501c(3) public charity, your donation may be tax deductible.
Consult with your tax accountant to learn if you donation is deductible.
We are very proud of our GuideStar Bronze Seal of transparency. (Learn more)
We earned our GuideStar 2021 Bronze Seal of Transparency as a way of demonstrating our accountability and transparency as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We earned this badge by providing GuideStar key, up-to-date information about our organization. Read our Guiding Principles.
Yes, I want to help keep music alive.
Make your check payable to Opera Club of The Villages and mail to:
Opera Club of The Villages
P.O. Box 1128
Lady Lake, FL 32158
Opera Club of The Villages annually awards several types of scholarships for promising instrumental and vocal music students in Lake, Marion, and Sumter counties Florida.
Harold S. Schwartz Music Scholarship is awarded to graduating high school seniors planning to major or minor in music in college or university.
Music Appreciation Program (MAP) provides financial support to qualified and vetted music teachers to defray the cost of providing private music lessons to talented musicians from The Villages Charter Schools.
Oscar Feliu Music Award honors the Opera Club's founder by awarding a senior student who has repeatedly demonstrated outstanding contributions-to and participation-in the music program throughout their enrollment at The Villages Charter High School.
Still thinking about making a donation to our scholarship program? (Learn more)
Accountability & Transparency
Donors, such as yourself, consistently seek ways and means to determine which charitable organizations deserve their donation dollars.
Frequently those donors turn to GuideStar, the largest source of nonprofit information; CauseIQ, an online service provider that helps companies grow, maintain, and serve their nonprofit clients as well as helps nonprofits find additional foundation funding, and to Charity Navigator, the largest independent evaluator and rater of nonprofits.
Bit About GuideStar
Every nonprofit registered with the IRS as tax exempt has a profile on GuideStar but not all of those 1.5 million nonprofits take the time to develop their GuideStar profile.
We did!
If you aren’t that familiar with GuideStar, they extract each nonprofits public information from government agencies as well as from the IRS and then aggregate the information into the “Nonprofits GuideStar Profile” - profiles that each nonprofit has the opportunity to update and maintain.
A Bit About CauseIQ
CauseIQ uses public information from various government agencies to provide information and tools to help companies discover new nonprofit clients. CauseIQ customers are third-party organizations that use the CauseIQ data along with their own analysis to inform their respective customers (i.e., foundations and corporations) seeking philanthropic assistance.
A Bit About Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator’s mission is to help donors make informed philanthropy easier through their unbiased, objective, numbers-based rating system that uses three consecutive years of IRS 990 annual tax filings from qualified 501(c)(3) organizations.
The Opera Club has not yet reached the $200,000 gross-receipt IRS 990 filing threshold, thus we file the abbreviated 990-EZ. Though the use of the 990-EZ prevents us from securing an official Charity Navigator evaluation, we are able to use the Charity Navigator methodology to conduct our own financial analysis for your consideration.
Opera Club - Using Charity Navigator Nonprofit Analysis Methodology
Program Expenses / Functional Expenses = 88.72%
(The larger the % indicates our fundraising costs are being well managed.
Administrative Expenses / Functional Expenses = 8.32%
(The smaller the % indicates we are doing well in managing our Admin expenses.)
Fundraising Expenses / Functional Expenses = 1.90%
(The smaller the % indicates the more scholarship money that becomes available.)
Fundraising Expenses / Total Revenue = $0.02
(This number indicates how much of each $1 raised pays for fundraising expenses.)
Net Assets / Total Expenses = 0.92 years of working capital
(This number indicates how many years we can operate without additional fundraising.)
Note: Above valuations were made using data from three pre-pandemic years of financial statements.