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/