Great Day in the Sun

Today was a great day to get out and enjoy our Arizona sunshine. I had the opportunity to play in the Arizona Real Estate Women (AZCrew) annual golf tournament. The proceeds went to the Phoenix Rescue Mission. One of my team mates is very involved in this organization and related how many hundreds of thousands of meals PRM serves each year, and that number is rising every day. I am proud to be on the board of the Interfaith Cooperative Ministries (ICM), a 25 year old non-profit that serves the working poor. ICM provides food boxes, clothing, and in some case cash assistance especially if utilities are going to be shut off. We have seen a 30% increase this year. Some of our clients are probably illegal, but most of our clients are children and we cannot in good conscience turn them away. We do not serve the homeless, there are other agencies that can do a better job with that population. We have food drives several times a year and work with St. Mary's Food Bank for the bulk of our food boxes, but they have had to cut back in the past 1 1/2 years. Our clients can only receive 6 food boxes and then it is bye bye. This has helped to thin out the people regarding ICM as their Food City and the people who really have an emergency need. It is a real struggle, but we have fantastic volunteers and community support. We have been working to have job placement advisors on site, have free medical clinics available and basically filling in the gaps that most of these folks have. I have been heading up our "Planned Giving" initiative and always welcome donations, gifts, and bequests. I was happy to learn more about the Phoenix Rescue Mission today and hear that they are going to start up a planned giving initiative. That is the way to go. We cannot expect or rely on the government to provide everything to everybody. We must help these people get back on their feet and become productive. Handouts alone do not work.

www.icmaz.org