128 big Boxes For Soldiers en route to Africa, thanks to the many who lent a hand

The 2021 Boxes For Soldiers Care Package Drive is officially a wrap. Our boxes are en route to their final destinations in Africa.

This year we packed 12”x12”x16” boxes rather than USPS Large Flat Rate boxes. Each box was three times the size of our usual individual care packages: 128 of the big boxes translates to 384 packages of items sent to our troops serving overseas, a new record for BFS.

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s success: Warwick Town Hall, Albert Wisner Public Library, Leo Kaytes Ford (Warwick), Amore’s Pizza (Goshen), Patriotic Insurance, Chester Public Library (Chester), Florida Public Library, and Keller Williams Realty (Middletown) for serving as collection sites of donated goods.

We thank Heart of the Hudson Girl Scout Council for its generous donation of 21 cases of Girl Scout cookies for inclusion in our boxes- what a sweet treat from home.

We deeply appreciate the generous checks received from the Warwick Rotary and HERoes Indeed: your support is invaluable.

Many thanks go to the guys from Triple Bogey Golf for their generous donation of military boot socks and Pez dispensers.

UNFI provided us with an amazing array of food items straight from the Items Requested List - a wonderful donation.

Thank you to the children from the Florida, Chester and Goshen schools who wrote cards and letters for inclusion in our boxes.

Thank you to all the groups who solicited donations of items or funds in our behalf- we truly appreciate the support.

We are so appreciative of the generous use of space at the lovely Warwick Conference Center, where we had more than enough space to spread out all the donations for sorting, counting, packing and storing until ship date (thank you, Albert) as well as a beautiful view.

We thank Track 7 and Guardian Storage for their generous donations of boxes and packing tape.

Thank you to Bo Kennedy for picking up and recycling our cardboard pile.

Thank you to Jose Velez of the USPS and his postal workers for their cooperation and support of our cause.

In addition to the donations enumerated above are all the individual donations of time, money and items that made the drive so successful. Each bag of chips, pair of flip flops and bundle of Paracord enabled us to help fulfill the requests from the units we supported. Thank you to all who contributed, no matter how large or small. Without you, the drive couldn’t happen.

Finally, thank you to Brian Caplicki and Tracie Chernowski of McGovern-Caplicki Keller-Williams team in Middletown for their tremendous financial and moral support of BFS. Your commitment to our troops is awesome. Thank you so much.

See you in May 2022.

Sincerely,

Kendall Kless, BFS Founder

Rob Bowen, Co-organizer