Question 6. What cause do you care about and how have you supported your favorite charity?
My wife and I strongly feel it is important to help kids. Roughly one in seven kids in our area does not have enough food to eat. Over the years we have helped with several fund drives to help children in our area.
Currently we support our local Back Pack Program. The way this works is children in need are given a back pack full of food and vouchers to take home over the weekend, when they otherwise may not get anything to eat.
I do the easy part, I just donate money. The money is used to purchase the food, and volunteers then fill the back packs. I know the money I give is important, but I do want to say that I feel it is the volunteers who organize this program every year, and the people that take time out from their schedule to help fill the back packs are who really makes this program come to form.
One evening when my wife and I were grocery shopping a little girl who knows my wife came up to her to say hello. This girl was so excited that night because she was going to have pancakes for supper. She received a back pack with pancake mix, fresh fruits, and vouchers for some milk and eggs. She told us that there was enough that she was also going to have pancakes for breakfast the next morning! She even informed us how the back pack program works “these nice people, I never met give money so I can have food to eat”. That comment got both my wife and I choked up. Even though that happened a couple years ago I got a bit teary eyed just typing it.
I want to mention the Back Pack Program got started here by a leadership class through our local Chamber of Commerce. They started this several years ago and it has had a residual lasting effect.
One of my wife’s high school classmates had a little girl with a brain tumor. Another woman in our community wanted to put together a fundraiser to help with medical expenses. She wanted to do an auction and a free will donation lunch. She was asking for help on Facebook. I told my wife to message her and tell her that we would donate enough ground beef to serve at least 600 people, and also a beef bundle as an auction item.
Going back even further we started a fun program at our church. We donated the beef from a calf to our church, and some of it was sold off in a silent auction. The money and the remaining beef were used to serve needy people in our area. The parish really had fun with this. One thing they did was hold a name the steer raffle, to earn some extra money.
We would not be able to do any of these things if we had not been so blessed to be in the cattle biz, and I had not learned the right things from the right people.
Mr Cattlemaster 