Holidays & Heroes

Holidays and Heroes has a goal of easing the burden of financial stress that is felt by our local military members and their families primarily during the Christmas holidays. By actively engaging the local civilian community to make donations and sponsor families by purchasing gifts for them, we have been able to create a way for our civilian population to give back to those who have sacrificed so much for the citizens of the United States. For the past two years, we have also been able to provide an additional monetary gift card presentation to each and every one of our recipients later in the Spring to help with any additional financial needs that our military member recipients might have. With the cost of goods increasing recently, we know that our military members need more support now than ever in the past.

With our goal in mind, we will continue to look for ways to grow our community of donors, both individuals and corporate sponsors. We are actively and purposefully working on our communication and social media outreach to expand our community support, and we are looking at engaging a donor management system like Network for Good to continue our strategic plan of growth for our foundation. A donor management system will help us to continue the engagement and participation of our previous donors while working to add new donors to our community.

We have a very active Board of Directors as well as Advisors who are all volunteers but are enthusiastically involved to help Holidays and Heroes continue to thrive. We meet regularly and also are using a survey questionnaire to assess our 2021 Christmas event looking for both all of the positive outcomes as well as places we can improve. The Board wants to be sure that Holidays and Heroes will continue to grow and be sustainable into the future.

Holidays and Heroes, prior to being a foundation, grew from an idea to help the local military members in 2015 to a 501(c)3 Nonprofit Foundation incorporated in 2020. The first year we helped less than 40 families, but each year we have grown to helping more families. This past Christmas 2021, we helped 134 military families with over 200 volunteers and 600 total participants at our Military Family Christmas Party. We also were able to facilitate 2 cars being given to 2 deserving military families from Caliber Collision's Recycled Rides program. We hope to continue the car giveaway in the future as we continue to touch more military members and their families lives. We know from testimonials that we are making a difference as we are "Serving those who have served us!"