[KenWittlief]

Some thoughts:

Government contracts. The US government spends billions of dollars a year for defense contracts, research, NASA and JPL. What if the government required that, in order to win engineering contracts a company must support the FIRST program by supplying a certain percentage of mentors to FIRST-like programs. Same for universities that get government grants?

Centers and resources: If FIRST standarized on a playfield that could be used every year then we could have FIRST-centers in most cities. A place where HS teams could go to work on their designs, a centralized machine shop, practice field, computer equipment... This would be much easier than having every HS in the area put together its own robotics workshop and practice field every year. A FIRST-center in each city could also employ full time machinsts and mentors, maybe people who have retired from industry and want to do something important with some of their free time?

Transportation: getting students to the local worksite, getting teams to the local events, and even transporting the local champions to the state regionals and championship - these expenses could be funded by the school district, like they do for sports teams.