Secret Santa Event for the Idaho Veterans Wellness Center

Greetings TRR members, and hope you all have a good and safe Thanksgiving.

This year we are doing a Secret Santa project for the Idaho Veterans Wellness Center (IVWC) instead of an individual family.  Sandy Thomas has volunteered to take the lead for this. Below is a flyer with complete information on how you can participate.

With the crazy year that this has been, the funds to operate IVWC have dried up. The IVWC depends on walk-in donations and a minimal grant that covers a few months of rent.

With the limitations Covid-19 is placing on this nonprofit organization, the justifications for receiving the grant are questionable. The operation costs to keep the doors open are the same, but social distancing protocols limit the size of the class availability. Privately, the owner of this nonprofit is a TRR member, a disabled vet, and a single dad of three teens. Most of his income goes to paying IVWC rent and operating costs without ado.

The IVWC has helped and continues to help many veterans, all cost free to the Veteran. It practices healing through the arts, such as sculpting, painting, stained glass, etc. It also provides free counseling to veterans and patient advocacy support when veterans do not get what they need from the VA.

On the First Thursday event every month, food is prepared for everyone who visits the facility to enjoy the veterans’ artwork.

Therefore, we think IVWC is a perfect candidate for the yearly Secret Santa surprise and are excited to share the opportunity with anyone who would like to join in.

Please contribute what you can, and pass on this information if you know of anyone who may be interested. We will present the gifts to the IVWC in a Santa bag on Christmas Eve.

Ho, ho, ho! This is going to be fun! And our support will be very important and much appreciated. 

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TRR Giveaway and other reminders.

Hi Chapters! We are trying to spread some holiday cheer and decided to do a raffle! Please forward this to all your chapter members so they can participate as well! 

How to enter: Fill out this form by 12/31/2020

Prizes: -We will do a random drawing to pick winners to get some cool prizes of various paddling gear, a white water or recreational kayak and other cool prizes!
-Everyone who enters will be sent a small gift of trr swag even if they aren't randomly selected for a larger prize :)

When? The drawing will take place on January 4th, 2021**Please note: Entries about TRR + your name+ chapter will be displayed on our website and social channels**OTHER REMINDERS: -

We've kicked off our kindness challenge but you can still sign up! Sign up here. Hope you all are having a great week! 

Nazanin Yousefnejad

Communications Manager
Nazanin@teamriverrunner.org 
www.teamriverrunner.org"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do"TEAM RIVER RUNNERHealth and Healing through Paddlesports Helping Our Wounded VeteransCFC #36703

A message from our chapter Coordinator Bob Tracy

Greetings Team River Runner Boise Members!

I hope you are all doing well, staying safe and healthy.  Its the time of year we do our planning for events, equipment purchases, and fundraising, and normally we would be setting dates for pool sessions beginning sometime in December.

With Covid surging in the state, we are making the unfortunate decision to hold off any in person meetings or pool sessions for now.  I hope we can get comfortable with pool sessions early next year, and will keep you posted.

For our planning we will do it through at least initially by email and where appropriate with phone calls, and consider something like zoom calls if it becomes clear that would be beneficial.

I will lead with a starting point draft calendar for events under two scenarios-one if we get clear of serious Covid restrictions by May, and the other if we do not.  We will migrate from one to the other as appropriate based on the virus status. The initial draft one I imagine we all hope for, without Covid restrictions, will duplicate what we had planned for last year, including the multi day events.  

The second draft one will not include the multi day events, and will pick a day within the timeframe of the multi day events for local single day events.  That way we can hopefully have a calendar you can use better for personal planning than the more adhoc approach we ended up using this year.  

We will also be including a flatwater program led by Dayne, and a women’s event program led by Christina. Kevin and I will take a look at our inventory (And Dayne for flatwater) and lead with a draft for you to review of our priority for purchases as money becomes available.For fundraising I will also send around what we had decided to do this year as a starting point draft, and again we can take input to finalize the plan. Beyond these local things, National TRR will be having some virtual events and activities including virtual kayaking skills training and workouts.  We will keep you posted about those opportunities.  

I would also encourage all of you to keep up with both our local Boise website https://www.teamriverrunnerboise.org/ and the National website (you can link to it from the local site or go directly to https://teamriverrunner.org.

As always, let me know if there is anything you would like to discuss with me, either about TRR or anything else in your life.Best regards and hope to see you soon.

Bob T