It Takes A Village....

I know, I know, it's the MOST over used saying around, right behind "are you kidding me?' but in this case it is spot on.  It does take a village to run ERK.  We have the Board of Directors, who are there at every turn and we have our core group of volunteers, that we know we can call at the drop of a hat or in this case the drop of a Christmas present, but we can't forget those who always and I mean always help us in a pinch.  Our village consists of lots of people and I have to say thank you to all of you who are there to help us in a pinch.  I've heard over and over from people that "I wish I could help/volunteer more..." but all I can say is, when you do the things that we ask you to do, those are HUGE!!!  We all get busy with our own lives and families and we can't always find time to get everything done in our own lives, but when you get a call from one of us asking you to "Could you please go pick up a donation in Loveland?" and you do, beyond belief, HUGE!!!  When we call and ask you to work an event that, of course, will take time from your own family, beyond belief, HUGE!!!!  So you see, it does take a village!  We love you and we can't Thank You enough for everything that you do to help us help the future.  http://www.ericaraeskids.org/
   

ERK equals an Elderly Program too!

ERK has an Elderly Program!  Yes, we do!  This program is near and dear to my heart and especially after the last couple of weeks.  You see, my 76 year mother has been fighting an enormous blood clot which is located in her femoral artery in her left leg.  The blood clot is from her abdomen to her foot....enormous, is an understatement.  We as a family, circled the wagons and went to work by taking care of her.  I took time off from work, my daughter relieved me when she got off work, we took her for blood draws after she got out of the hospital, my brother and his wife were there at the drop of a hat and my poor dad was a nervous wreck.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that she had a "support group" and it makes me wonder how many of the elderly out there in our community have no one?  It makes me so sad to think of someone elderly, well, anyone actually, having to go through the pain and misery that my mom has gone through the past 2 weeks alone.  I know we never know the "whole" story about why these older individuals are alone, but why can't someone be there?  I/we have a better idea of how our Elderly Program is going to work from now on to help these wonderful people who have made a difference in shaping our past/future and I hope that all of our donors will be there for them like you have been for the children.  I/we are always collecting items like:  toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry soap, dish soap, bar soap, deodorant, etc.  Keep in mind that for some of our elderly these types of items are luxuries!  Oh, and don't forget we also take money so that we can go shopping and buy the items that we are short.  If you have any questions about our Elderly Program call us, this one is my baby and I can't wait to hear from you.  303-919-2829  

No, I didn't fall off the radar....

And yes, it's been awhile my friends....where to start?  As Glinda the Good Witch would say, "It's always best to start at the beginning".  The last time I was here we had just finished our first ever board retreat and after spending 8 hours locked (I say locked, tougue-in-cheek) in Erica's apartment, we were excited, overwhelmed, caught up in the moment - if you can call 8 hours a moment and ready to make some drastic changes to ERK.  I know when I got home that night I was exhausted but totally on board with everything that had been discussed that day.  When I woke up the next morning there was this niggling doubt in the back of my mind, kind of like the little devil on my shoulder saying "Hey, what happened yesterday?" and as I was going over the events of the day in my mind, those same words came blurting out of my mouth to no one in particular, as I was alone.  I felt like at some point the impression was that ERK was broken and was in desperate need of fixing and I couldn't come to terms on when that had actually happened.  I mean we had helped over 1,100 children have a Christmas that they would not have had, we had given needed gift boxes to 20 elderly couples living on subsidized housing with a $50 a month allowance, if you will, to buy neccesities such as toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry soap and the like and we had contributed to helping many, many school aged children have the neccessary school supplies to start school, so when again did we become broken?  Perhaps I was overreacting, some of you know I do that, but I couldn't get my mind around all the changes that had been proposed.  I decided that I needed to step back for a little while and do some serious thinking about my part of this non profit and what I was seeing for our future and what the future was beginning to look like after the retreat.  So, I cut myself off for a few days and did some serious soul seaching.  When I finally sat down and talked to "mama bear" I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she and many of the other board members were of the same mind.  We weren't broken, we were just trying to become a "Corporate" non profit instead of the "Grass roots" non profit that we had had so much success with up to this point.  So, I guess after all of my rambling, what I am trying to say is that we have voted as a board to not change our mission statement or our vision statement and it is going to be business as usual for ERK.  We have learned so much in the past few months from our very dear friend Tavherlee about what we need to strive for in the future but for now we will be staying as is....one day when ERK becomes a household name we will have to impliment the wonderful ideas that Tavherlee has shown us.  Thank you for all your support in the past and I/we certainly hope that we can count on your support for our future endeavers(sp) to be able to adhere to our mission statement:  "Devoting ourselves to helping our community.  Our main purpose is to help children that are living in abused and underprivileged situations."  Please visit us at http://www.ericaraeskids.org/

First Retreat Over.....Many More to Come?

Well, our first retreat is over and done with and Holy Cow did we get alot accomplished.  Of course, "mama bear" and I had to have a little disagreement that the rest of the Board had to witness, but alas (I love saying alas), we HAVE been friends since we were 12, so it's all good and rest assured that we are still the best of friends.  If you can't disagree with the important people in your lives - who can you disagree with?  Anyway, I digress, we have a clear plan of where ERK is headed for 2012 and what we ARE going to accomplish. I say ARE because I truely believe that none of us on the Board will accept defeat on the proposed accomplishments.  One of the main things that we worked together on today was new Mission and Vision Statements.  Our old Mission Statement didn't cover everything that we have been doing since we added our Elderly Program and up to this point we had never had a Vision Statement; per se.  Our new Mission Statement is unbelievable and we as a Board ROCKED it in working together to come up with it;  "Our Mission is to give to those in need at the times they need it most.  We do this by providing much needed items at critical times of the year to create a better quality of life." and our Vision Statement is "Our vision is helping our future by helping our community."  Okay, maybe we had a Vision Statement but it only included the kids in our community and as you know we are now reaching out to the elderly too.  We had a brainstorming session this afternoon to come up with fundraising ideas and I'm not going to go into detail yet because we need to do some more research on these ideas but I think we are going to have a great year as far as fundraising goes.  Tavherlee has been and will be applying for many more grants and we now have official committees for things like Marketing, Finance, Statistics etc. and someday soon we will have other non profits wanting to grow up to be "just like us" - LOL!  I am so excited about how far we have come in just 2 short years (believe it or not our 2nd anniversay is in February) and I can only imagine where we will be in the future.  Thank you again for being there when we need you, without our volunteers and donors we wouldn't be celebrating our anniversay and all the things we have accomplished in the last 2 years.

Can you say Board retreat?

Sunday, January 15, 2012 will be our first Board Retreat...8am til whenever....thank you, Tavherlee.  This will be our first retreat since our inception (sounds like a movie, doesn't it).  We have white boards, sticky notes, information (we had to approve before hand) and ideas to share.  Work, work, work to decide what and how we are going to accomplish our goals this year for ERK.  As I told you before, we received a $10,000 grant from Wal Mart's "12 Days of Giving" and that is really a very small amount of money in the real world of non profits to achieve everything that we want to accomplish this year.  When you look at some of the other non profits around the country, $10,000 is pocket change, but to us at ERK it is HUGE!!!!  Tavhelee, who is our newest Board Member, and has years of experience with other non profits, has been applying to corporations for future grants and I would like to ask everyone to keep their fingers and paws crossed that we are approved.  Oh, the things we could accomplish with more grants!  I certainly don't mean to sound ungrateful for our first grant of $10,000....because I am thrilled beyond belief with this grant.  Wal Mart's grant will go so far to help us help the children in our community and I am really excited about our Board Retreat tomorrow because it is going to educate all of us on the Board as to how, where and why we need to do the things behind the scenes to achieve our dreams that we haven't known how to achieve before.  You know, up to this point we have sort of "flown by the seat of our pants".  Of course, it has worked for us, as we have been able to gift many children with Christmas, Back-to-School items, Fun Days, ets. but we need to move forward and become a "professional and organized" non profit that others wish to emulate.  Please wish us luck tomorrow and don't worry; notes, papers and questions will be flying, we will of course be keeping our strength up with a "potluck" breakfast and lunch......stay tuned for an update on our first Board Retreat and where we will be going this year.

The BEST hugs in a long time!!!

Today I met a darling little girl named Sierra and at 1am this morning Serra's older brother woke Sierra and their mom because he smelled smoke.  Yes, you guessed it, their apartment building was on fire.  Sierra, mom and older brother left the apartment with only their "jammies" on and whatever shoes they had time to throw on their feet.  When your home is on fire, what do you do?  You RUN and that's what they did.  I have told many people that the only thing that terrifies me more that an F5 Tornado (and it must be an F5) is a FIRE!  Fires are so fast, furious and quite often deadly that it is terrifying to find yourself and your family in the middle of one.  I saw this story of the fire on the news this morning as I was getting ready for work and it made me so sad that another fire had displaced 16 families from their homes.  As it happens, Sierra's mommy works at the same place that I do and one of my coworkers called me to tell me about her situation.  I decided that ERK needed to do something to help this family and called our "mama bear" at ERK to get the go-ahead.  After numerous phone calls, I found Sierra's mommy's phone number and set up a time to meet Sierra, mom and older brother at the local WalMart to give them a Gift Card from ERK to help them buy some clothes that weren't "1am jammies"that had been through an evacuation.  Sierra's family are not sure when they will be able to return to their home to check out the damage and if anything is salvagable, so we at ERK want to make sure that they have things to call their own.  Once they are able to evaluate the situation, we have a room full of items that have been donated to the program and I told Sierra's mommy that if need be, we can have a "shopping day" to help replace lost items from their home.  When I left Sierra, mom and older brother they were headed to shop and when they gave me a hug of Thanks it was the BEST hug I have had in a very long, long, long time!  I love being able to help and being a part of ERK makes that a possibility!!!  Have a happy and safe weekend.

Goodbye, 2011! Hello, 2012!

Well, it's that time of year when we say goodbye to one year and hello to another.  For all of us at ERK 2011 was interesting to say the least....we learned alot about ourselves and our nonprofit.  We gained new board members and we lost some, we made some mistakes and we learned from them, we got on each others nerves and we pulled together when the time was right and now we go into 2012 with a clear idea of where we need/want to be and ideas on how to get there.  In 2011, we helped so many deserving children in so many ways, but we couldn't have done any of it without the support of all of you!!!  As this year comes to an end, in just a few short hours, I can't thank you enough for all you have done for ERK this past year!  For several years now we have been struggling to get our name out there and now with your help, people are starting to know who we are and what we are accomplishing in Erica's memory for our community.  I believe that 2012 will be an amazing year for ERK and the children and elderly in our community will benefit like they never have in the past.  Those of us that sit on the Board of Directors as volunteers are committed to making a difference for our community and all that that entails, so heres to a fabulous 2012!!!  Have a safe and happy new year!  visit us at http://www.ericaraeskids.org/