The Greater Peoria Chess Foundation is a 501(c)3 non profit organization dedicated to encouraging chess in our community and school systems. Chess helps students to develop many life skills that will help them as they navigate with challenges that lay ahead.
Services
School Donations
Our school program provides sets & boards to schools in the greater Peoria area which have an active chess club or chess team which meets regularly and competes with other schools. We provide teaching chess software which can be used either with teacher instruction or placed on a computer so that students can do self learning. We also provide a curricula, complete with instructor's notes and integrated with the software so that teachers, who are not chess players, can provide beginning teaching of the game to their students. All of these are free to the schools, they only need to have an active club and request the materials.
Training & Competition
GPCF Youth Chess Club meets every Friday evening at Hardee's in the Willow Knolls shopping center, 7 to 9pm. Kids are split by skill levels so that everyone can have fun and compete with players of their own strength. Friday night is also fun night. Open chess is held about once a month at Mark Bills School. Mark Bills is more of a party meet, greet and play chess. We enjoy controlled chaos.
We also offer a summer chess camp, workshops, and other acxtivities. If your group has a particular need please let us know and we will see how we can help.
Adult Community Participation
Kingsmen Chess Club meets every Monday evening at Hardee's in the Willow Knolls shopping center from 7 to 9pm. members usually start arriving about 7pm and the evenings activities start at 7:30. Play lasts until 9 o'clock or when they kick us out. The club provides rated & unrated play and the yearly Peoria Championship.
IESA Support
We provide support for the Illinois Elementary School Association annual state middle school championships by providing the sets and boards for the event. Our local tournament directors also serve as officials for the IESA tournament. When covid hit and IESA ran into funding issues, we held a state chess tournament and donated the profits directly to IESA.
Coordination & Scheduling
For schools that are already active we can also help provide coordination with other schools as well as a schedule of tournaments for your student's participation. We also provide assistive tournament organization & direction help to schools.
USCF Scholastic Membership Program
At our 2019 board meeting we approved a new program to help underwrite USCF memberships among our local students who are participating in GPCF tournaments. To be eligible students must be a new or expired member who's membership expired in the month of the tournament.This is an on-going program which has continued uninerrupted evver since. We have added hundreds of new scholastic players with this commitment to rated chess and increase the numbers of participating members, especially among our inner city youth. Note: We have already provided more than 300 new US Chess memberships each year with fresh faces attending nationally rated events. We are still offfer memberships for $9, even though the USCF raised our price a couple of years ago.
