Books for Soldiers

So, anyone who knows me, or has happened upon this blog, probably knows of my involvement in Books for Soldiers. See that little link up in the left hand corner? There ya go! Books for soldier is a program where the members of the military deployed in a war zone can write in and request books, music, magazines, or other items of which they might be in need. For instance, one of the groups I support on BFS is SSG Sean Abbott and his unit in Afghanistan. SSG Abbott is on his 5th (!) deployment, and is stationed in a remote area of Afghanistan where there is no PX and all mail and supplies are brought in by helicopter sling. Yikes! There are also members of the military who received little or no mail and their names have been submitted, usually by a friend or Commanding Officer, to BFS for support. These men and women are so grateful to know that their country not only knows that there are two wars being fought, but that we also remember those who are fighting.

Recently, I and the rest of the BFS volunteers received the following from Storm Williams, the founder of Books for Soldiers:

It Is A Bad Economy

Starting at the first of this year, BFS started a robust fundraising campaign here in North Carolina. We contacted small companies and some large companies you probably have heard of. To date, we have received a stack of letters that begin with "we deeply regret not being able to donate this year" and no cash. From our corporate donation campaign we have received a tad under thirty dollars from a philanthropy grants group in Winston Salem, NC. That was it, nothing else. Times are tough for all non-profit groups, food banks from all around North Carolina and across the nation are suffering from a lack of donations and a sharp increase of those in need. The article below arrived in my email today about a women's shelter closing because of a lack of donations.

http://www.the-signal.com/news/article/1356/

The Next Step

The BFS Board of Directors have discussed this problem for some time and have decided to have another go at fundraising. We are working on a different campaign aimed at companies in larger states - California for example. Every time we want to do fundraising in a state (cold call, direct mail, advertising) we need to file with that state's Secretary of State - filing in all states if prohibitively expensive so we have to pick and choose. In our last newsletter, we reported on the hacker attacks that coincided with our 5th Anniversary. Those DNS attacks didn't help our balance sheet. Our final IT bill from the datacenter for that week was a tad over $11,000. If you recall, the hackers brought down the whole datacenter just to try to kill us. The Board set a goal of $70,000 to raise by November 1st of this year. If that amount is not raised, the site will close on December 31st, 2008. If we cannot make the fundraising target, the Board will seek to sell the site to another 501(c)(3) and any new owner will need to be qualified - have the IT talent to run the site, the funding to keep it going and the funding for the required upgrades, both software and hardware. We would also stop accepting new OVs on November 1st and stop accepting new books requests from soldiers on December 1st, 2008.

What Does It Take?

*It takes a lot to run BFS on a monthly basis. The monthly funds required to run an operation like BFS are large. Here is a partial summary of where the donations go. All figures are a monthly average for 2007.

Books, DVDs, other carepackage items $1153

Postage $812

Rent $1600

Utilities $277

IT Services (server farm, hosting, bandwidth) $4258

IT Maintenance Contract $1500

IT Security Software License Fees $350

There are other things like broken computers, the occasional software purchase, insurance, pencils, toilet paper for the bathroom, etc. that we purchase. No one at BFS receives a salary. The BFS presence on MySpace, Flickr, YouTube are all free. Our presence in Second Life has also been donated. We will be disabling the uploading of photos in the next few weeks to save bandwidth....My hopes is that eventually we can raise more than the $70k survival goal. Last year our goal for 2008 was to move to a website design where the cumbersome OV process was performed online and searching and finding soldiers would be a breeze - subscribing to soldier requests is my favorite new BFS feature. Now we are just struggling to stay open.

How You Can Help

The ONLY reason we are open today is because of the OVs that have donated so far this year, but now I need to ask more of everyone.

1) Office party fundraiser - Coordinate a "Save BFS Day" at work and urge, beg, cajole your co-workers into coughing up something for BFS.

2) Have your company cough up some cash. We will send your company a formal donation request, just send us the company name, contact name and address and we will get it out right away. Send these requests to me personally (storm@booksforsoldiers.com)

3) Have your place of worship pass the plate (hat, kippah, whatever) for BFS. Consult with your church's leader about holding a "Save BFS Offering" one day this month. Checks should be made out to "Books For Soldiers." If they have any questions or concerns, please contact me directly to set up a call.

4) Visit our donation page and give what you can.

http://booksforsoldiers.com/donate.php

or by check:

Books For Soldiers 2008 Fund Drive

353 Jonestown Rd #123

Winston Salem, NC 27104

In Closing

I started BFS five years ago and fully expected it to be online for only six weeks, that is the length of time I thought it would take for our troops to finish up in Baghdad and come back home. I am also terrible at predicting who is going to win the next NASCAR race. If worse come to worse, it has been a good run - a great run in fact. In the first 6 months of operation, we collectively shipped over 400 tons of packages to the Middle East, that is when I stopped counting. We also built the largest English library in the Middle East - together with US soldiers at the Baghdad International Airport in the months following the fall of Baghdad. We have done a lot of tremendous work, made a lot of great friends and even a wedding or two! We have also lost a lot of friends and we have received way too many memorial flags. Either way, you can all be proud of what we have achieved. I promise that we will do everything in our power to meet our fundraising goals and will appreciate any help from you. Thank-you for your support, patience and hard work over the last 5 years. And most of all thank-you for your support of our troops.

Storm Williams

Founder

Books For Soldiers*

Legalese: BFS is exempt from filing IRS Form 990. Any financial information found here should not be considered as a replacement for IRS Form 990 or a supplement to an IRS Form 990.

There you have it. My PSA for BFS. Spread the word, hit up your companies philanthropy office for their contact person (I'm going to! And my dad's old company, and hey maybe I'll hand out fliers at the Maritime Parade..), or if you want and can, make your own donation. I do not mean to offend by this post, it would just be a shame to let this program and all the troops who depend on it to fade into history. Thanks for putting up with me. Back to our same Bat Channel of all me, all the time, soon. Because I'm that self centered!