Several years ago, the Cherokee County Homeless Veteran program, a subunit of Thomas M. Brady American Legion Post 45 in Canton, Ga., started the "Adopt a Vet" program when we ran into a Navy veteran and his family we were looking to support for the Christmas Holidays. The letter we got from the young daughter once we read it started this whole program. In her letter she mentioned that she only wanted two items for Christmas: 1 - a picture of her to give to her aging grandmother, and 2- a new winter coat, as she'd never had one.
Ice would have melted had we been up north after reading this. Ever since that letter, our program with our partners at Arrow Exterminators and the GA Pest Vets organization have done a winter coat drive to obtain coats for veterans, veteran outreach programs, schools and non-veteran groups who need coats.
In 2024, our program with our partners donated 8,000 coats to those in need, to include the VA Homeless Program, two Atlanta veteran outreach programs, North GA Veterans, Fort Eisenhower, and several groups helping those in Tennessee and North Carolina who lost everything due to the hurricanes.
This year, Chad from Arrow set the bar at 10,000 coats, and I was not sure it could be done. But covering 12 states and partnering with other pest control companies and our program, we achieved the goal.
We start the collecting in early September and run through Dec. 1. Before mid-December we sort all the coats and other items donated and get them out to the organizations that had requested them. Many orders came to us in the hundreds, and one came in for over 4,000. Even though we gave out the 10,000, we still came up about 500 short as we had one group we could not fill, and we got a late request from another group.
Rather than stop at the 10,000 we are on a quest to get the needed 500 coats that we are short so we can make sure everyone who needs a coat ahead of the winter will get one. In the several years we have been doing the coat drive, we have given away over 35,000 winter coats to those in need.
This is what paying it forward is all about
