Report on FAFSOM

In August we held a dinner to honor our Military Heroes; those currently serving and those who have served in our past. That dinner was a huge success. We had over 120 people in attendance and even though we never intended it as a fund raiser, we raised over $1,600. After covering our costs, we have enough money left to distribute phone cards to every deployed local military person we can find.

To help us accomplish this we have created a FAFSOM webpage. You can see our webpage and help us build it by going to www.fafsom.org. When you are there you will see an online form to fill out. You can tell us about a family member or friend who is serving in the military. If they are over seas we will send them a 1 hour phone card along with a note to give you a call.
We had such a great time that we’re making the dinner an annual event. We set our 2008 date as Thursday, November 6, 2008. We’ll start advertising and fund raising for this event fairly soon. We learned with this first dinner that many businesses and foundations need several months of planning time to be able to sponsor such an event. So we’ve allowed for 13 months of time for our local businesses to get on Board. This year we had 36 individuals and businesses donate anywhere from $10 to $250 prior to our dinner. We had another 50 people make donations the night of the dinner.

We expect the 2008 dinner to be a larger event. We may out grow the National Guard Armory. If that happens we’ll eat in shifts and then rearrange the place for our speaker. We have an idea for our speaker for next year but I cannot announce that until we get a little closer to the event. If you missed this year’s event then you missed a great affair. General Murray did a great job telling us about today’s Michigan National Guard and we had 4 World War II Veterans. Since that dinner I have discovered that there are several more World War II vets in the county and we’ll do our best to get them all there next year.

In the meantime there are a few things you can do to help. First go to the www.fafsom.org webpage and give us some more information. Second, use GoodSearch.com; this is a search engine on the Internet that pays a non-profit 1 penny for every search people conduct. A lot of people use Yahoo or Google to do their searches but when you do that all the money goes to Yahoo or Google. If you use GoodSearch.com the money goes to a non-profit. The National Civility Center has agreed to share its return from GoodSearch.com until FAFSOM gets its own 501c3 status. So to help out all you have to do is go to GoodSearch.com and put National Civility Center in the WHO DO YOU GOODSERACH FOR box.

FAFSOM has been a great organization doing a great service for all our Military Heroes. So this week my hat is off to the more than 120 people who came to support the Family and Friends of our Local Military this past August 17.