By Harold Rodenberger
Last week another visitor came into my office asking where to find our clubroom. As always, I tell such visitors we don’t have a bar but that we do many other things for veterans, their families and our community.
For those readers who haven’t had a chance to attend meetings or join in our outreach efforts, here’s how our national headquarters describes out mission:
Our Mission: To foster camaraderie among United States veterans of overseas conflicts. To serve our veterans, the military and our communities. To advocate on behalf of all veterans.
Locally, we help fulfill this mission in many ways.
First, we take care of our own members and their families. Last month, for example, we donated from our relief fund to help a member whose young daughter is being treated for cancer; we routinely subsidize the meals served at our social and meeting nights; we maintain a library on military subjects for veterans; and our service officer gives top priority to helping our members get the benefits they have earned from the VA and other government agencies.
For other veterans and members of the community we operate a website, manage a Facebook page and publish a newsletter publicizing specialized information for our community; we visit the VA Hospital to bring a little cheer to the patients; we allow other veterans’ organizations to use our hall at no cost and allow nonprofit organizations of many kinds to rent our hall at minimal rates.
For the larger local community, we accept unserviceable flags for proper retirement and disposal, we donate food and other items to our local homeless camp and we visit local retirement homes. Our Color Guard has performed color-posting ceremonies in several venues and is scheduled for more.
Next time someone asks you what our members do besides drink and tell war stories, please let them know the many ways we support the VFW mission by serving veterans and our community.
We have been publishing this newsletter for almost three years now. It draws praise from members, other VFW members and readers in the community but we have found that those who receive the on-line edition don’t read the paper as much as we would like. To encourage more people to read the newsletter we are going to a quarterly printed publication mailed to all our members.
Our website and Facebook page will carry breaking stories as they develop. The printed newsletter will consolidate that news and carry it to all members.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.