Raised by a single mother in Sarasota, Michael Long knew what it was like to go without. For a time in his youth, his struggle led him to become disengaged in school and land in trouble. A stint in the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice woke him up to the fact that he had to become accountable to himself. He refocused, did well at Venice’s Gulf Coast Marine Institute and Riverview High School, and earned a spot at the famously exclusive New College of Florida.
New College also gave him an opportunity to show off his problem-solving skills. “I didn’t know the tuition didn’t include housing until they sent a bill for $10,000,” he says. “I told the financial officer that I had no way to pay that and he made a joke that someone once lived on a sailboat anchored off the waterfront campus in Sarasota Bay for free. I took him seriously and found a guy on Craigslist who was willing swap my Jeep Cherokee with 200,000 miles on it for his beat-up 30-foot Santana sailboat. A friend and I managed to get the boat up from Marco Island even though neither of us knew how to sail, and I lived on it for four years while I went to college.”
A love for sailing was born in Michael that has since taken him around the world. And since 2013 when he founded his nonprofit SailFuture while still an undergraduate, Michael has been sharing his experience of focus and hope with disengaged young people.
“When I started SailFuture, I wanted to find a way to bridge the gap between New College students and lower income kids who were growing up the way I had,” he explains. “We put New College students and underprivileged Booker High School students out on two-person Collegiate 420 sailboats—which are dinghies—and if you both lean to one side, they flip over. So you have to work together. It was an awesome way for these two very different people to laugh, play, bump their heads, skin their knees, and come out of the experience with a relationship that has implied trust. We have taken that concept and applied that to everything we do at SailFuture.”
From dinghies on Sarasota Bay less than a decade ago, Michael has grown SailFuture far beyond anything he could have dreamed. The nonprofit now employs 40 full-time staff in five different programs. It includes a project-based, experiential high school located in a renovated1926 Pinellas County school building and set to open next month, two residential foster care homes, and a $2 million fleet of vessels for the program’s sailing expeditions. The fleet includes a 105-foot yacht with staterooms that can be chartered by the public and the 65-foot racing sloop “Defy The Odds,” which was donated to SailFuture on the condition that Michael and a team of kids in the program sail it back across the Atlantic from Turkey where it was docked. SailFuture serves more than 200 children per year, and sails in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Eastern Seaboard.
“What I am most excited about now with Sail Future is our new high school,” Michael says. “We want to reach disengaged learners like I was. Our school isn’t for ‘troubled’ kids. It’s for any child who is disengaged in their public school education. As a learner, if I didn’t see any practical use for the knowledge a teacher was requiring me to learn, I had no intrinsic motivation to learn it. Our philosophy is that we are going to teach students to solve real world problems and give them practical, hands on ways to learn.”
There is also a practical end to the education that SailFuture provides.
“Another of SailFuture’s programs is a yacht-training program,” Michael explains. “The premise of the program is that there is no diversity in the sailing and yachting industry. There’s no entry pipeline because to work on a boat you have to have experience, but most people from marginalized communities and communities of color never get the opportunity. We operate training programs that provide paid-apprenticeships to our kids to learn how to maintain and operate yachts for future careers.”
Sail Future boasts an over 80% high school graduation rate, which is very high in the sector. Sail Future also offers private charters, is actively recruiting board members, and is always in need of donations and gifts of vessels.
“Helping these kids gives me a sense of purpose and meaning,” Michael says. “Giving back to them is most important part of it all.”
SailFuture.org