The Holiday Fund 2025 BONUS

As everyone in our dojo community knows, Goju Karate holds the annual Holiday Fund drive each year, and the 2025 edition is now underway.

While tuition revenue covers our basic expenses, we rely on the generous donations of patrons and students of the dojo to help us reach higher every year.

Special Bonus

This year, The Marshal restaurant (visit them at https://www.the-marshal.com) has generously donated a $100 Gift Certificate to be awarded to the top donor to this year's Holiday Fund.

Charlie Marshall, the Chef-Owner of The Marshal is committed to innovative and delicious farm-to-table cuisine while also operating an amazingly energy-efficient award-winning restaurant.

So what's The Marshal's connection to karatedō and Goju Karate?

Well, if you've ever wondered where all the wood-scraps and broken boards go from the annual Tameshiwari Seminar and from the Tameshiwari events of the NYC Karatedō International Championship, Charlie Marshall can tell you.

"We collect bags and bags of broken adult and teen boards from Goju Karate every time the dojo has a breaking event. Those boards all go to power our wood oven here at the restaurant, and get a second life as fuel to help us deliver our award-winning cuisine," said Chef Charlie proudly.

One Lucky Donor

So this year, the top donor or donor family will receive a $100 gift certificate good for a delicious meal at The Marshal.

The dojo is grateful for The Marshal and Chef Charlie's support.

More About the Holiday Fund

In 2025, donations enabled our dojo community to reach students and do things that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

The most important thing that the Holiday Fund does is that it helps us make it possible for students to train who cannot afford to pay full tuition. This included both adults and kids. These karateka are no different from you or your kids – they train just as hard and line up alongside you in class.

But they wouldn't be there if it wasn't possible for the dojo to offer greatly-reduced tuition to those that need help.

This year, it enabled us to offer tuition support to a number of kids especially: we made it possible for some kids to train, others to participate in the November tournament events, and for others we helped them afford a uniform.

We also supported, and continue to support, both kids and adults who've been training for a while who can't pay the full tuition for training. Some of those karateka have been training for years, and that wouldn't have been possible without your generous donations each year.

Karatedō has always been meant for everyone — everyone, that is, that has a deep desire to improve themselves and to make an impact on their community and the greater world.

For other adults, donations to the Holiday Fund help them pay tuition when circumstances in life create financial hardships temporarily, and they need help for a period of time until they once again can contribute more fully to the dojo community financially.

No matter the circumstance, however, our Dojo is proud to be a place where we support one another as part of a greater community.

Enabling Innovation and Bringing Karatedō to a Bigger Audience

Donations also helped us create and deliver special programs and seminars and to extend karatedō to a wider and more global audience. We continue to make Kagami Biraki accessible to other dojo and several dojo in other countries had their first Kagami Biraki because of this. Later in the year, other dojo participated in our seminars, and we even helped to create special recognition for members of the global karatedō community.

We also subsidized programs for the greater community, such as the Women's Self Defense Seminar this past Spring.

In 2025, we expanded our Mentor Program for kids who want to be kids doing martial arts, but have special needs to make that happen. Our dojo has made that happen every Saturday morning in the Mentor Program for several years. But for the first time, we now have a weekly Wednesday 5PM class for our Mentor Program, and those kids (and many do!) can now train twice a week.

And for the first time in 2025, we proudly watched our Mentor kids complete in a both a division in the Tameshiwari Tournament, and also participate in a special kata division as well. Everyone who contributed to the Holiday Fund 2024 made that possible.

Improving Our Dojo

And this year, we completely re-did the older locker room and lockers, and replaced them with wonderful new ones (that even had working locks!)

We also improved our audio systems for LiveCase classes, and this Fall we upgraded our server to be able to support different LiveCast systems for students in our LiveCast and Uechi Deshi programs, and we also deployed the core server for our automated scoring system in kata and kumite.

Make a Difference

It's annoying to be constantly asked to contribute, but it's also important to understand that institutions like our dojo only exist because they are valued and supported by their community.

We only ask for help once a year, traditionally always at the holiday season.

So if you're able to help, please donate generously. You'll have both the deep appreciation of the dojo community today as well as that of the dojo community of the future.

Step up, and make a difference.

Gassho.