En Garde! Detroit

Greetings Friends & Supporters,

It has been a wonderful summer with many advancements in our efforts. We set a goal to instruct 400 youth this summer with a 7 man team, we shoot for the moon in this office. We did ended up landing among the stars, instructing close to 300 low-income inner city youth this summer!

Among these stars, were approximately 100 recently graduated high school students who received federal Pell grants for their first five semesters of Wayne State University.

We partnered with Wayne State University to provide an enrichment program using fencing for these bright new college students.

Talk about bright, did you know En Garde! Detroit has an on going study which tracks academic scores of student who we instruct? As expected, a high percentage of our student’s academic scores were higher after having fenced with us for the summer.

We also hosted our First Annual fencing tournament called, The Ballestra 350, the largest multicultural fencing tournament in the USA. With close to 1000 visitors from the community, approx. 100 fencers, and 400 visiting youth from as far away as Pontiac School District. We had a very successful event & plan to expand our efforts in the future.

None of this this could have been possible without the support from our local & corporate sponsors. Especially the fencing clubs & teams from around the area. Excited about the advancements being made in the name of fencing, the fencing community from across the state of Michigan turned out to support our efforts.

This year we had an all-star Guest Director panel. The Ballestra 350 invites Guest Directors to interact with the children as not only mentor & role models but fencing directors in their actual bouts!

Wayne County CEO- Robert Ficano & State Repersentatice Fred Durhal Jr.

So What’s Next?

As summer comes to a close En Garde! Detroit will be working hard to lease or buy a facility
which we can house our students and provide 5 day a week training in the Detroit area. If you have resources to share in furthering our goal contact us.

As always, thank you for continuing to help En Garde! Detroit - “Train the Body, Sharpen the Mind”