From Our Hearts needs your help!

From Our Hearts is a not-for-profit 501c3 that began with a simple request by a son for a few handcrafted cards so that he could send “special” cards home to his wife and children while he serving his 6th deployment in Iraq. Today, the initial dozen handcrafted cards have turned into thousands of quality, handcrafted cards created and donated to From Our Hearts every month by hundreds of stampers nationwide and shipped to our servicemen and women serving our country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you make cards like I do, then you make one every day. Perhaps there are some laying around that you don't know what do with. I will be going through my stash to see what I can send.

~~Rachel

This was taken from today's From our Hearts Blog post:

We have been so busy! Thanks to Gretchen Barron and her plea on her blog for cards, From Our Hearts' post office box has been HOPPING! This past Thursday, 18 boxes arrived and many were from new contributors!

These past few days, we have had the help from local volunteers, Sue and Mark S, Susan T and Angie J who helped "check in" the 18 boxes – and some that were not "box ready" were taken away by them to be matched with envelopes/clear envelopes/slips – and also 8 boxes were readied for shipment (thanks to Sue who took on this task by herself!)

The result: 4 boxes shipped Friday, 8 on Saturday and 12 boxes will be mailed out on Monday – these Martie and Tom worked Saturday night. This will bring our total cards shipped to well in excess of 175,00 cards to date! The total will be figured once the custom forms are brought back from the post office on Monday (12 boxes x 290 cards each…that is alot of cards!!!)

This is a result of the generous contributions of those who heard our plea – and many through Gretchen's posting… and we appreciate all who are sending us cards!

With 40 contacts we are supporting, we need many, many cards!

We emptied out the Anniversary/Wedding/Best Wishes box – and our Miss You box is very low (we somehow don't get many of these cards compared to others).

Tom (Martie's husband) commented as we were filling the boxes on Saturday night – "the friendship cards all look so frilly – and if we are sending them to the troops, what about "the men?" The majority of our service personnel are men." He has a point! We add a mix of cards to every box and our friendship cards are all "girly"!!! Being a woman, I just never thought anything of it…

So, a challenge to all of our stampers and contributors: Can we make "masculine" friendship" cards?

I thank you all of our contributors… these boxes could not have been filled up without your help!

We can use your help with postage as our bank balance is running very low – your help with shipping the boxes over is appreciated (we send 40 boxes every 4-6 weeks) and we purchase envelopes and clear envelopes for the boxes that we recieve that need them – and we have been receiving thousands of cards of late that need both. Checks sent to our PO Box or contributions via our paypal link will help us to continue to send over the dozens of boxes every month. Please consider contributing. We need your help.

Thank you, From Our Hearts!