Our story
Twelve years of backing people nobody else was backing
We started by paying for a girl’s Irish dancing lessons. We are now building the largest sourced record of an entire art form. It is the same instinct both times.
- 1984
A grandmother gives an eight-year-old boy a ventriloquist puppet because she thinks it will be funny. She is right, and it does not wear off.
- 1990s
That boy pays his college tuition with a scripted magic and ventriloquism show, priced above everyone else and booked more often than any of them.
- 2004
He and Travis Miller start a marketing company in Orlando with two hundred dollars between them.
- 17 April 2014
The foundation is incorporated in Florida by James A. Venezio and Travis R. Miller, to find and support children with exceptional talents. The IRS grants 501(c)(3) status in August.
- 2015 onward
The grants start. Rory Cain moves up two levels of Irish dance. Akeem Tonge wins two state divisions in karate. Gifted players from the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra get to Europe. Alongside them the Jazz Ambassadors play free for the community, for years.
- 2015–2024
The children’s books arrive — eight of them, written to be performed out loud. See the shelf →
- 2021
Jimmy Vee joins the Vent Haven Museum’s Board of Advisors.
- 2024–2025
He runs the Vent Haven ConVENTion — the world’s longest-running gathering of ventriloquists — as Executive Director. The 2024 convention honours Mark Wade’s twenty-three years of running it.
- 4 March 2025
The corporation is renamed the Read, Laugh, and Learn Foundation as the children’s literacy work becomes the main event.
- 2026
It becomes the Ventriloquism Institute, and the archive passes half a million sourced facts. Same corporation. Same EIN. Same instinct, pointed at an art form that has never had an institution of its own.
Why ventriloquism, and why now
Because it is running out of time. The people who remember the golden age are dying. Figures are being thrown out by families who do not know what they have. Workshop knowledge that was never written down is going with the makers who held it.
And because nobody else is doing it. There are museums that hold objects and a convention that gathers people once a year. There has never been an institution whose job is the whole thread — the history, the working profession, and the children who might take it up next.