This letter was written by Sarah Holcomb and shared to the chiefs in her area. It’s a great model to follow when reaching out to your local departments!
The goal of reaching out is to:
1. Grow your local groups
2. Get these resources to the families who need them
3. Increase awareness of our brand and programs
4. Increase our financial support by offering the department programs and attracting new individual donors
Hello to you all!
My name is Sarah Holcomb, and I am the Fire Wife Captain for New Mexico with 24-7 COMMITMENT, a non-profit focused on strengthening marriages and families of first responders. I apologize for the mass email, but we have some amazing programs and benefits that I wanted to make sure every fire department in the state knows about.
First, let me give you some background about us. Our organization was founded by Dan and Lori Mercer, from Columbus, Ohio, about three years ago. Lori had started a blog and was talking about some of the challenges of the fire life (with the permission of Dan, of course!), and there were lots and lots of women who commented and identified with what Lori was going through. And Lori, being the amazing, giving person that she is, said, “I’m going to create a community to address these issues.” And her blog, FirefighterWife.com was born. Personally, I’m married to Seth, a captain in the Santa Fe Fire Department, and we celebrate our 12th anniversary in January. I wish that I had had these resources when we were younger, and I’m dedicated now to making sure that others have them available when they need them!
We are a 501(c)3 organization with federal approval, and as such, we are dedicated to providing dearly needed resources where folks need them most.
Did you know that the divorce rate in the fire service is estimated to be near 75%? That’s a staggering number that shouldn’t be a reality. Our mission is to honor, strengthen and support first responder marriages and families. How do we do that? We have our website (https://247commitment.org/) where we have a TON of resources to offer to support our mission. If you look at our website, you’ll see that we have communities to join – we are organized mainly on Facebook at the moment, but as we grow our local in person groups, I’m sure we will branch out. Our communities are secret, private groups that one must be “invited” to join after signing up on the website for a FREE membership. We have the Fire Wife Sisterhood and our newest in 2015, we also have the Honor Guard for the guys! From personal experience, this is an amazing community of people who support each other. The women are amazing to share things with and extremely supportive.
We also have a lot of special interest groups on the ladies’ side – Fit Fire Wife, Fire Up Your Love Life, and other special groups for topics such as celiac support, infertility issues, Rescue My Marriage (for relationships needing special support), and many, many others all listed on our website.
For couples, we offer Marriage On Fire, a special six week intensive marriage course to better your relationship.
We offer many resources, through individual book studies, as well as some of our most special resources packaged to supplement department EAP programs.
Another great thing that we do is actually get these fire department folks together across the nation to focus intentionally on their marriages and relationships at Commitment Weekends. This year we are branching out from one Commitment Weekend to FOUR! And there’s even one close to us in Estes Park, CO in May 2016.
We also have a local, in person New Mexico group! As the captain, I’m in charge of coordinating opportunities to get together, as well as fundraising for our group. In addition to our free memberships, we do offer the opportunity to give back through paid memberships. I could go on for a lot longer about all of the amazing things that we offer, but I’ll let you check out the website for yourself. I have attached a flyer that you can feel free to put up in your department offices and fire stations. I’ve also attached some information about the department programs that you can purchase.
If you have any questions, please let me know! In addition, if you’d like to bounce anything off of Lori, you can reach her at contact@firefighterwife.com (cc’ed here.) I’d really like to encourage the brotherhood and sisterhood across the Land of Enchantment. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
Sarah Holcomb
Advisor & NM Fire Wife Captain
FirefighterWife.com
Here is a YouTube video documentary showcasing our last Commitment Weekend (formerly called Flame Fest) in West Virginia this year:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnhHAMyf1_Q