If Black Friday and Cyber Monday are about what you can get, then today is about what you can give. For Giving Tuesday, four groups that support needy members of the military have joined forces with one another and with industry. They’re reaching out to the public to raise funds under a program called Mission Give. For how it all works, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turn to the president of the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Robert Ruark.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And let’s begin with the four groups getting together. I guess one of them is the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society. What are the other ones?

Robert Ruark Well, we have four total. We’ve worked together very closely. The Army has their Army Emergency Relief. The Air Force has their Air Force Aid Society, and the Coast Guard has their Coast Guard mutual assistance. And this is the third year that we’re going to do this together to raise funds for those soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and Guardians that need the help. So we’re very happy to, again, join forces and do it.

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Tom Temin And now that you’re together, what are you actually doing to get the word out and to get people to give money?

Robert Ruark Well, we all have our individual campaigns, but we join together and we’re all promoting the cause. And what we’ve done is we’ve gotten together for a third straight year with Lockheed Martin. So Lockheed Martin, of course, is the global security and aerospace company. And they do a $1 million match. So it’s hard to say no to something like that. But Lockheed is a great supporter of all the services. And so this year, we hope to beat the 1.2 million that we raised last year, because it has proven to be a very successful campaign. In the past two years it was a competition, a friendly joint competition. But this year we said we don’t need to compete against each other because it’s doing so well, so let’s continue to work even closer together. And Lockheed loves that idea. So we call it Mission Give. And so if you want to donate to one, two, three or all four of us, just go to missiongive.us and make a donation and Lockheed will match it. And that’s the best part about the whole thing. Lockheed is just a great supporter of this and we’re happy to do it.

Tom Temin And how do you get the word out? Because there are many, many, many competing voices for fundraising at this time of year.

Robert Ruark They’re absolutely. Giving Tuesday, as you know, has taken off in the last few years. And so as many media outlets as we can, we all have websites, we all go together to various corporations. And we do discussions and talks and things like that. And more importantly, we’re out there, particularly with Navy Marine Corps Relief Society. We’re at 52 locations. In fact, I think we’re the only military society that’s actually has offices around the world all the way from the Middle East to the Western Pacific. We are there with our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. The thing is, we all support each other. So even if we’re at a marine base or at a Navy base, if you bring in a soldier or airman and they’re just having to be assigned there and they need some sort of support. And let’s face it, if you’re a E-2, an E-3, an E-4, maybe you got three or four years in the service. You’re not making a lot, you’re married. You’re probably living off base and housing because there’s just not a lot on base. You’re often going to need a lot of financial assistance. So we help each other out. It’s very much a joint support. And so we work together very well. And a lot of the corporations that we talk to love to give to all of us, because they support the entire military. So this is kind of a joint way of doing fundraising, to be frank with you.

Tom Temin And what is the reach out methodology? How do you get beyond simply the people that may know the military members say, their families or friends and kind of broaden it throughout the rest of the world or society?

Robert Ruark Well, we are the four official charities of our services. So, for example, the Navy and Marine Corps Relief, my boss is either the chief of naval operations or the commandant. The same thing. So the same thing for the other three. So we actually belong to the services. They help us get the words out. They’ll put out fundraising messages, they’ll support us in any kind of communications. Plus, we all have our own marketing capabilities. So we do that ticker by print through the web, through podcasts, videos, things like that. And we’re sending those out. We’ve been sending them out for about 2 or 3 weeks. But the main purpose is what the media can help us with is drive forth that we’re working together with Lockheed Martin, too. And these funds, the other thing is we’ve all been around for many, many years, these services. We were founded in 1904, for example. So we have a significant outreach. And so that word will be able to get out to these. And we typically, we all do financial assistance. We all do disaster relief and we all do education assistance. And then some of us do a lot of other things. For example, Navy, Marine Corps. We have 34 thrift shops around the world that are run by our volunteers. And they do all kinds of great things like repurposing clothing and wares and things like that at bargain prices. But we all have niches and we all have a very good set of constituents that we support.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Robert Ruark. He’s president and CEO of the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society. And let’s talk a little bit more about the need for, say, those E-2, three, four people that have, as you mentioned, been in the military a short time, relatively. They don’t get paid much. What types of assistance do they generally need? Is it just basic cash to pay rent and buy food and and holiday presents?

Robert Ruark Well, of course, the basic thing is financial assistance. They have housing costs. Now, let’s face it, if you’re new, E-2, E-3, you’ve been in less than four years and you get married, your chances of getting housing on base may not be that great. So just not enough out there and there probably won’t be. So you probably have to live off base. It could be a sizable commute. You’re going to have car expenses, which often come up. You’ve got to deal with the gas prices. You have to deal with housing costs, which is hard. I will be honest, just on personal experience, it’s hard for the basic allowance for housing to keep up with the price, the actual price of housing out there when you’re renting and things like that. And a lot of our young troops, they have life events that happen. They have illnesses in the family. They may  need some sort of assistance because of flooding like recently with Hilton or Hurricane Lane. They have a lot of frequent moves. And as we all know, when you’re doing a lot of these moves every 2-3 years, those costs are hard to cover. And the government does a really good job of trying to hit it. But to be honest with you, there’s just things that aren’t often covered. And then deployments. So you go on these 4 to 6 month deployments and they happen pretty routinely. Even when you get assigned overseas from there, you deploying a lot. So those tend to also bite into the budget as well. So there’s a number of things that come up on that. But some of the special things that the aid societies do or like for example, where I work, the relief, the Navy Relief Society, we have visiting nurses for example. So we have 24 registered nurses that are assigned around the world at different bases, and they are basically there for health, education and resource referral. So you can imagine if you’re living off base in a place like Spain or perhaps in Bahrain where you don’t speak the language and you can’t drive and something comes up, and you think there’s a medical issue, who do you go to? How do you adjudicate what can be provided on base and what can be provided downtown? That’s where visiting nurses exist. But we’re the only ones that have that. The thrift shops we have to help defray the costs of actually going downtown, purchase new things. And also I think the other thing is the togetherness. When you have volunteers around the world, and for example, we have about 2800 right now, it’s a sense of community. And those volunteers that the service members spouses can come in and help support the work that we do.

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Tom Temin Quick question about the nurses. I imagine for female service members overseas, especially in a place like Bahrain or something, they would have particularly difficult time navigating the local health care system or any local system in those countries relative to try to navigate them in the United States.

Robert Ruark Well, you’re absolutely right. One of the things we do to address that is support groups. So we’ll have, for example, we’ll have a prenatal and postpartum support groups, because a lot of our our young service members, spouses, they may be have a new member of the family coming in. And so they’ll go out there and the provide a lot of education on that. We also have something called a budget for baby workshop, which is a one day financial workshop which actually shows a couple here’s the cost of that baby. And the absolute goal is to prepare a budget. And so at the end of that, we’ll give them if they get through the one day, which they will, and they prepare a budget, will give them an Amazon gift card for $50 and a hand knitted blanket for that baby. So we have incentives like that to help address some of the the growing needs of a family.

Tom Temin And for members of the public that might want to bring good grade stuff to a thrift shop, can they do that?

Robert Ruark As long as they can get on base, we will be happy to do that. And one thing about thrift shops is it’s basically gently used clothing and wares. But they are so popular today, particularly with the younger crowd, because it’s repurposing things. It’s not adding waste to the environment. It’s making use of what we have. And they the popularity of our thrift shops is enormous. They’re growing about 25% each year. And that money that comes from the thrift shop goes right back out to the sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines.

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