Palatine woman helps thousands of soldiers
A Veterans Day project last month had schoolchildren at St. Hubert's School in Hoffman Estates and Our Lady of the Wayside School in Arlington Heights boxing up care packages for military troops serving overseas.
Their teen counterparts then distributed them, complete with shipping label attached, to parishioners at Sunday Masses, asking that they pay the $10 postage fee to have them mailed to individual soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The response at both churches was so positive, they each ran through 200 boxes in no time.
It's a common occurrence, says Pat McCoy of Palatine, founder of the Yellow Ribbon Support Group. She has a list of different churches who host drives each month to help ship off care packages. People just want to support the troops, she says.
Next week, similar campaigns will be going on during holiday concerts at Walter Sundling Junior High School in Palatine, when patrons will be asked to pick up one of the boxes that has been assembled by students, and ship them off to the troops.
All told this year, McCoy expects to mail 3,425 boxes overseas, which is a record number for her grass-roots project, she says.
What started in 2003 as a way to support her own son and his Special Forces unit of 12 soldiers has grown to impact nearly 19,000 soldiers since she and her band of volunteers started assembling the care packages.
“It's exploded,” McCoy says. “Now, interest has gone nationwide.”
Nearly every day it seems, she receives contributions or letters from supporters. Her latest came from members of the Black Diamond Girl Scout Council, which takes in troops in Ohio, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.
They sent McCoy a delivery of 1,800 cans of “Hot Cajun Crunch” nuts. Their troops sell varieties of nuts and candies as fundraisers, much like the Girl Scout cookies here.
For the last two years they have shipped off their leftover containers of nuts and mixed candies to McCoy and her Yellow Ribbon Support Group in Palatine to be included in boxes to the troops.
They are following a lead set by the Girls Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, who donated more than 500 cases of cookies to the organization and that doesn't include the boxes sold by Girl Scouts and earmarked for the troops.
McCoy started including Girl Scout cookies in each care package as “the ultimate symbol of home,” she says.
In October, McCoy and the Yellow Ribbon Support Group were the recipient of 3,000 pounds of candy, collected by drives at Central Road School in Rolling Meadows and Pleasant Hill School in Palatine, as well as local dentist offices.
McCoy's biggest current problem is storing all of the goodies. As it is, she fills two rooms at the Palatine Village Hall with cookies and cans of nuts. What she can't fit, she sends to VFW Post 5151 in Streamwood, whose members ship them off to the troops.
The Yellow Ribbon Support Group website solicits names of individual soldiers, who then receive a minimum of two boxes from the organization. The first contains toiletries, snacks, cards and letters and a Beanie Baby.
Later, they receive a box filled with paperback books, more toiletries, Girl Scout cookies and candy.
Between the steady flow of contributions and organizing drives at local schools and churches, McCoy has her hands full. In fact, she quips that when she worked full time as an administrative assistant for Pepper Construction in Barrington, she never worked this hard.
But she wouldn't trade it for a minute, she says. She gets great satisfaction from boosting morale among the troops, and from seeing the response from the community.
“There's just so much generosity,” McCoy says. “It's coming from all over.”
To find out more about the Yellow Ribbon Support Group, visit yellowribbonsg.org.