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.