Eagle Project: Operation Gratitude (UPDATED)

Last updated on: February 10, 2015 at 11:04 am by willduquette

Eagle Project: Operation Gratitude (UPDATED) 2015-02-10T11:04:38-05:00 willduquette

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Goal: 1000 letters. Final Total: 845. Publicity Ended: January 31, 2015. Project Ended: February 9, 2015.

When we started we were hoping for a minimum of 250 letters; 1000 was a goal we hardly hoped to approach. By the end of Saturday, January 31st we’d had a groundswell all the way to 595! We expected to get a few stragglers coming in, and end with a total just over 600. Instead the letters kept coming in, and we ended at 845! This is a massive success.

Of those, about 100 came to the PO Box listed in this post; the rest were from local sources. That’s pretty darned good, in my opinion, and I’d like to thank all of you who took the time to write. Thank you!

The letters have been screened and delivered to Operation Gratitude, and the project write-up is complete; David will get the last signature tomorrow (February 10th), and turn it in to the council on February 11th, the day before his 18th birthday and the hard deadline for completing his Eagle requirements.

Here’s an opportunity for all of my readers to support our troops, and at the same time (in an indirect way) support this blog. My eldest, David, is a boy scout. He’s currently a Life scout (the rank just below Eagle); and all he has left to do to be an Eagle scout is to complete his Eagle project before his swiftly approaching 18th birthday.

For his Eagle project, he’s organizing a letter-writing campaign for Operation Gratitude—but I’ll let him tell it:

You’re right, that’s not a boy scout uniform. He’s also in his fourth year of JROTC.

Hello Patheos readers,

I am David Duquette, a Life scout and son of Will Duquette. I am currently working on my Eagle Project and would like your help. I am doing a letter drive for a group called Operation Gratitude.

Operation Gratitude is an organization that collects letters, hygiene products, books, movies, and so on, to put in boxes to send to our troops overseas. They get these items completely by donation. They are completely non-profit organization.

Every year they ship out 150,000 boxes, and consequently they need many letters to go with them. The letters are meant to show our service people that they are not forgotten, and that we care about them. My goal is to get people to write 1000 letters, and then have a group of volunteers, trained by Operation Gratitude as screeners, screen them. This way they can take the prescreened letters and ship them off right after I hand the box to them.

This is where you come in. I need people to write the letters. I am asking you to write letters. Whether you write one or multiple (cards are acceptable), please send them to the following address, between now and January 31st:

David’s Eagle Project,
PO Box #424
Verdugo City, CA 91046-0424

Thank you!

Operation Gratitude provides guidelines for the kinds of letters they are looking for. We’re looking particularly for letters to deployed service people.

The point about screening is that Operation Gratitude needs to weed out inappropriate letters—death threats, propositions of marriage to the recipient, and so forth. This is time consuming; by making it happen before the letters get to Operation Gratitude, David’s not only providing them with letters they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, but with letters that are immediately useful.

Naturally, David isn’t relying solely (or even mostly) on my blog to get people to write letters; but part of his job is encouraging those around him to get the word out. So here I am.

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