Department

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a joyous Christmas and brought in the New Year with a bang!

During the Christmas holiday the ALA Department of Alaska was busy delivering Christmas bags to our veterans at the Anchorage Pioneer Home, the Palmer Home on Palmer, the Chugiak Nursing Home and the VA center. We also delivered new fleece jackets along with a few other items to our veterans at the domiciliary.

With saying this, now is a suitable time to remind all of you to be documenting all your Unit’s volunteer hours and/or monetary donations to our veterans, military, their families and your communities. It is important to report this information to your department chairs. We only have end of year reports BUT, that does not mean that you can not forward any events as they happen to the department chairs. Let us make 2022’s goal of 100% for reporting. Talking about 100%. We all need to be working on membership. With the New Year here, we need to reach out to our members and let them know how important their membership is to us and our mission. Reach out to those lost members, thank the members that renewed or have rejoined and talk to those perspective members that want to be a part of our great organization.

While all of us believe in honoring veterans and servicemembers every day. The beginning of the New Year is a good time to look ahead at important military and veterans holiday dates. One of our upcoming dates is on February 3, 2022 – Four Chaplains Day. A day to remember the four U.S. Army chaplains who made the ultimate sacrifice when the USAT Dorchester sank during World War II. If, you have never attended a Four Chaplains ceremony, I would highly encourage you to do so.

In closing, a quote:

“For Veterans, who served to keep the dream alive, for those serving who keep the door of freedom open and the gates of doom closed and for our children and youth who provide the glow and sunshine of a promising future.”