Lightning Community Hero Video The first two years of the Bring Smiles program saw tremendous growth. We had connected to more communities than we ever thought imaginable. We had built a card donor base, added school and civic group partners and staffed our program with volunteers that would help our program be successful. We met every hardship with the will to press on. There were times that we ran out of cards, ran out of money and wondered if it was all sustainable. However, just when things seemed most bleak, amazing things… Read More

We were starting to grow our senior communities. We had made the connections to school and civic groups. Could there be other areas in the senior population that we could reach? That question led to a meeting with the Pasco County Elderly Nutrition program. We wanted to see if we could provide cards to be delivered with the seniors meals and possibly work with their congregate dining centers to have seniors decorate cards for us. Our ask was met with a resounding yes and our connection to senior meal programs was born…. Read More

Not only did we need a lot of cards, but we needed a lot of cards decorated. That presented two problems. We had to have a source for cards, but once we received them we also needed to get them decorated on the inside. A dual issue that had to be solved. However, the first issue was getting more cards. We had built a Facebook presence with a few followers, but we needed more. I decided to go out on a limb and spend a considerable amount of my own money using… Read More

Having made the decision to start the Bring Smiles journey, we now had cards and supplies and a little money, but to what communities were we going to deliver all these new found cards? How would we get senior communities to realize that we were legitimate and let us into their communities to deliver cards to their residents? I knew the first thing we were going to have to do was create a real non-profit. A tax exempt corporate entity with a real name that would hopefully open doors for us. That… Read More

On Friday of last week, I began the series about the Bring Smiles journey. For the next few days I will be sharing with you some of the stories of how we got to where we are today in the Bring Smiles program. I hope that you enjoy. As I spoke with the nurses in my grandmother’s nursing home, I quickly realized that there were many in her community that were not as lucky as she. My mom and aunt were great about decorating the board in her room for the holidays,… Read More

Do you ever feel like there is a hole in your heart and you can’t quite figure out how to fill it? There are many good things in your life like family, job, living situation and friends. However, you just don’t feel quite complete and you know that there has to be a little bit more out there to give your heart the food that it needs. That was me a little more than three years ago. When you are suddenly faced with an unexpected life occurrence that throws your very being… Read More

I love this quote! One of the beautiful things about giving, especially in the Bring Smiles program, is that we touch thousands of lives regularly. These are lives of people that we don’t even know. During several of our campaigns this year we delivered to senior communities in all 50 states, twice. These are all seniors who we have never met, seniors we have no personal information on and seniors that all deserve a little reminder that they are special. We do what we do with absolutely no expectation of repayment as… Read More

How much of our life do we spend trying to change the things that we have absolutely no control over? This can apply to people, situations or even unexpected events that happen in our lives. We spend so much time trying to change someone or something that ultimately we have no control to affect, that we often waste precious time in our own lives that we could use focusing on nurturing our own souls. In reality, we have the ultimate control. If we are in a bad relationship we can get out…. Read More

Being married to a teacher, you learn a lot about students today and how different they are than past generations. The things they say and do are things that we probably had never even heard of during the same time in our lives and you have to wonder how much technology plays a role in that. Have we advanced so far that the mere idea of a casual conversation, self discovered creativity, or imagination and wonder have almost ceased to exist? Have machines replaced social interaction to the point where it has… Read More

Have you ever heard the saying, “be careful what you say, someone may be listening”? A conversation with my good friend Jann this weekend got me to thinking about this when she said, “sometimes the little things you say can change the trajectory of someone’s life”. I thought back about all my encounters over the years and it was amazing to me how many times I could point out something someone said to me, word for word, even thought it may have been many years ago. Then I thought about the impact… Read More