Grant request · v1

Grant request — helmet service-fitness education (not sent)

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The letter

August 22, 2026

Dr. Hannah Cole
Chair
Palmetto Health Endowment
Gainesville, Florida

Dear Dr. Cole:

I am writing an exploratory letter of inquiry, not a finished application. Capital Forge League has a specific piece of work I believe sits inside your education and sports-medicine giving, and I would rather have your candid read on fit before we build a full package in the wrong direction.

The observation

A hockey helmet carries a certification sticker with an expiration date. That date is calculated from the day the helmet was made — not from anything that has happened to it since. A helmet worn twice a week through four seasons of checking, and a helmet that spent those years in a closet, expire on the same day. Nobody checks the difference, because there is no way to.

Two decades of engineering went into making helmets better at the moment of impact, and it worked. What no one built is the step after: a way to tell whether the helmet still in service is still the helmet that was certified. Retirement decisions rest on a visual once-over, a player's memory, or a date on a calendar. That is true in a rink, a race shop, a bike shop, a construction trailer — and most true in youth sport, where equipment is shared, handed down, and bought secondhand, and the helmet's history is unknown to whoever wears it next.

What we built, stated precisely

Capital Forge League, Inc. is a Florida 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 42-2301598, with a favorable determination effective May 1, 2026. We operate from Tampa, with an active presence in Boston. Our flagship technical workstream is a patent-pending, non-contact structural integrity screening platform for athletic helmets, assigned to the League (U.S. Provisional Application No. 64/123,976, filed July 31, 2026).

I want to be exact, because precision matters more than enthusiasm. The platform determines whether a given helmet remains fit for continued service, and it creates a serialized, tamper-evident record of that determination. It does not make an impact safer. We make no clinical claim and no concussion-rate claim. Its contribution is equipment lifecycle management and exposure history — the ledger nobody kept. We hold that boundary in every document we produce, and we would hold it on anything associated with your name.

Who does the work

We run this as education, not as a vendor pitch. Open-enrollment learning teams — pairing military veterans with athletes, and open to anyone who applies — take the screening problem as a real project: instruction in record-keeping, equipment literacy, and the financial and operational reality of running a screening day. Veterans arrive with cumulative exposure and operational discipline. Athletes know the gear from the inside. Pre-medical students and business majors round out the team. Participation does not require being an athlete or a veteran. The mix is the point.

Return to duty. Return to play. Return to service. The same question, asked of a person and asked of the equipment meant to protect them. That is the question we teach our teams to answer with evidence.

The ask

A twelve-month Florida education pilot, working with athletic trainers, youth programs, and university partners:

• Instruction hours in equipment literacy, serialized record-keeping, and financial literacy taught inside the same project;
• Community screening days that produce a service-fitness record for each helmet submitted — keep, retire, or look closer;
• A visual marker and tamper-evident history that follows the individual helmet across owners and seasons;
• Public reporting of participants served, instruction hours, and records written — never a concussion-rate headline.

We are requesting $25,000, restricted to instruction, screening-day operations, and record infrastructure. Capital Forge League takes no equity, no intellectual property from participant work, no royalty, and no economic interest in any participant venture.

What I am asking of you

Only your candid read. Right direction or wrong direction would itself be useful. If the Endowment has a preferred letter-of-inquiry form, we will follow it. If the fit is sports-medicine education rather than equipment operations, I would rather hear that now than revise under pressure later.

This letter is a Super Admin draft for CFL staff review. It has not been mailed.

Respectfully,

Mark Jones
Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Capital Forge League, Inc.

Direct: (813) 436-6988
mjones@capitalforgeleague.com
3030 N Rocky Point Dr W, Suite 150, Tampa, FL 33607
www.capitalforgeleague.com

PATENT PENDING
Helmet structural integrity screening platform — U.S. Provisional Application No. 64/123,976, filed July 31, 2026, assigned to Capital Forge League, Inc. The platform determines service fitness and creates a serialized record. No clinical or concussion-rate claim is made.

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