The Jefferson Bridge Association Inc

The association promotes educating the public, regardless of age, race, religion, or physical abilities, to play the game of duplicate bridge by financially supporting and teaching classes at convenient times in our local area. Over the past fourteen years, our association has had a series of eighteen classes for just over five hundred forty-nine newcomers to the game. In 2019, we had another class (in conjunction with olli) for thirty-eight newcomers through our national american contract bridge league. Our association coordinates with the acbl in sponsoring tournaments, so that local bridge players can meet and compete with other bridge players on a regional and national level. In 2017 we began offering two new games for soliciting new players. A thursday game was started to mentor and teach only beginners how to play bridge by giving a lesson at the beginning of each game by one of our expert players. This game has grown to have an average of seven tables each week. Also, we began offering a pro-am game on the second sunday of each month, for the benefit of beginning players wanting to partner with a mentor to improve their bidding and play. As previously mentioned, covid-19 caused us to adopt to a new way of having our games and a new way of doing business by combining the members of various clubs in the state and then prorating the income and expenses.

The association organizes games to benefit local charities by giving monetary donations and supplies, but most importantly, soliciting contributions from our members. This past year, we were instrumental in having our members to donate thousands of dollars, while attending our charity games, which benefited many of the charity organizations mentioned on our website. Covid-19 resulted in our club participanting in only one charity game in 2020,that being the alzheimer's annual longest day game, that was played online, and jba's members contributed a total of 6,930 directly to our local alzheimer's association.