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A Sad Farewell
In April 2011, Coups For Troops sent their first box of coupons overseas, under the director of the founder, Stephanie Almasy. After a few years, due to family commitment, Stephanie Lener stepped up from a volunteer to the Director, taking CFT to new heights and expanding the coupon shipments to over 14 counties. In early 2015, Stephanie asked me to follow in her footsteps to step up from a volunteer to the newest Director. One of the first goals I had was to get Coups For Troops recognized as a 501c3 non-profit charity. In October 2015, we received that distinction.
Since that time, the organization has served thousands of military families on every continent, with the support of tens of thousands of donors. Based on the feedback from our families, we save a military family on average over $1,500 per year with the coupons that are sent. We have seen military families transfer overseas and then back to stateside, donors come and then go as their situation changes.
Store loyalty cards were introduced here Stateside. We have seen online printable and digital coupons come along, and then online coupons being loaded directly onto the store loyalty card. Over the last 2.5 years, we have watched a steady decline in the number of coupons that come in the newspaper. We have been in dire need of additional donors for over a year, getting more requests from military families wanting to receive coupons than we can possibly fill. We made the incredibly difficult decision in October 2019 to not accept any additional military families, and to focus on just providing for the families to whom we had already committed. We hoped when making this decision that we would continue to add donors and be able to accept new military families again. Unfortunately, we continued to lose donors. Our existing donors email us saying they are receiving less coupons via newspapers and the mail. During this time, we also see cases of counterfeit printable coupons, to the point that some overseas commissaries will not accept home printed coupons. Thus, reducing the number of coupons available to be sent overseas. We receive information from our military families that because of the reduced number of coupons they are receiving, the usefulness of those has been cut to a quarter. In several cases, the family reports that what used to save them over a $100 per month, is now saving them $10-20. With the Covid-19 virus, we are also having donors tell us that due to family situations, they can no longer afford to send coupons. The number of donors asking to be removed and their families reassigned greatly outnumbers new donors joining our ranks.
It’s with heavy heart that I must announce that the CFT, Inc charity and Coups For Troops will be discontinuing service. We encourage existing donors to continue to send coupons to your families if possible. We encourage military families to communicate with their donors as to rather they want to continue receiving coupons. Please military families tell your donors if you are returning Stateside or if your situation changes. Over the next month, we will be seeking out another 501c3 charity that has a similar mission of supporting active duty military families. Any outstanding funds will be gifted to that charity. This is a sad day for us, but we are happy to be able to support another charity to continue our mission.
Thank you for the support, for the service to our country and the friendship. We had a wonderful 9 years of serving our military families.
Signed,
Lisa Bowers
Steven Long
Michael Miley
COVID-19 & Current Status
Hello Donors and Military Families!
Thank you for your patience during our silence. Our organization has been working to support our military families stationed overseas. It hurts us to not be able to accept new families, but weekly we receive word of another donor who is not able to continue due to financial and family changes or just lack of coupons to send.
Like the entire world, we are seeing some affects from the COVID-19 pandemic. We have seen donors tell us that they had been purchasing the Sunday paper for coupons, but can no longer do so. Donors telling us that they no longer have the disposable income to send the coupons. Military Families are telling us that the coupons they receive are less useful, as less food coupons are appearing in the newspapers / inserts. We are also hearing that packages larger than a standard (size 10) envelopes are being held up in shipment, causing some boxes of coupons to take 6-8 weeks to arrive to the military families.
The one blessing in this pandemic, thus far, is we have not received any word of family or donors lost due to this virus. Thank God for that!
As we stand today, we will continue to support our current matches. Pam Drigger has decided to step back, to focus on her family needs during this time. She has been the driving force behind CFT, so she is going to be greatly missed. I will try to pick up her tasks, so be patience with me! I will not be able to fill her incredible shoes, but I will do my best.
If I can help, please send an email or use the contact form. I will answer all questions as quickly as possible.
Lisa
Director / Volunteer
Closed to new Military Families
Coups For Troops have always prided ourselves on being able to serve our Military Families as effectively as possible. For our military families, we have always striven to assign multiple donors to each military families, in order for them to receive a variety of coupons. We understand that each Donor is sending the unwanted and expired coupons after their family uses what they need, so by assigning multiples Donors, our military families are more likely to receive a boarder range of coupons for their family.
Unfortunately, we feel the affects of more digital coupons and less people receiving the weekly newspaper. Throughout our history, Coups For Troops has always managed to have enough available donors to at least assign 1-2 donors as a new Military Family signs up. Then we would work to add additional Donors as we meet the needs of those we serve.
Over the last few weeks, the volume of new Military Families to sign up have greatly surpassed the volume of new Donors joining our program. Our current donors are at their capacity and can’t spread their coupons to cover more Families. For this reason, we are closed to accepting new Military Families. We are still accepting and assigning new Donors to serve the existing and new Military Families. We currently have 17 families on the waiting list. Once we have cleared the waiting list, we will determine if we can meet the need of our Military Families. At this time, we would rather service the families we have properly. We never want a military family to be disappointed with the volume of coupons they receive from our supporters.
Thank you for your continued support. If you would like to donate coupons for our Military Families stationed overseas, please go to the Direct Mail page and sign up.
~Lisa
WE ARE BACK
Hello Everyone!! Our database is back up and running. Please bear with me while I play catch up. I will have everyone matched and emails answered ASAP. Thank you & Have a great day.
Patience Please
The CFT Database is down for unscheduled maintenance. Due to this, if you are waiting for a match either as a Direct Mail or Satellite, we are unable to do so right now. Please fill free to go to our satellite location page until our database is back up and running. We are hoping for it to be back up within a week. We are sorry for any inconvenience. If you have any questions please send us an email and we will get back to to you ASAP. Thank you for everyones support of our program we couldn’t do it without yall.
2019! Welcome the New Year!
Hello Donors, Military Families, Supporters,
Coups For Troops had a wonderful 2018, with adding more Donors, more Military Families, and more Supporters. We are proud that we can serve so many military families stationed overseas, but of course, we couldn’t do it without our wonderful Satellite and Direct Mail Donors! They are the shining stars behind our program.
Our staff keeps the day to day operations going, while running their full time jobs and families! We even had a new addition to our staff family this year, as our Mail Coordinator, Pam Drigger gave birth to a son – Kaleb. He is adorable! Please be patient with her, on new assignments, because she’s running on the “new Mommy sleep schedule” aka no sleep.
We have a lot of growth in store for 2019! We are thankful to the people who help us financially to help with this website and our URL. All postage is currently self funded by the donors, and of course, none of our staff receives any payment.
We are always looking for ways to better serve the military families overseas. If you have an idea on how we can serve, please use the General Info contact form and submit a Suggestion.
Thank you for your service to our country and your support of Coups For Troops!
Sincerely yours,
Lisa Bowers
Director/Volunteer
CFT is 1 year old!!!
Happy Birthday To You!
Happy Birthday To You!
Happy Birthday Dear CFT Inc.
Happy Birthday To You!
That’s right, it’s CFT’s birthday! A year ago, a few of Coups For Troops volunteers decided it was time to take this hobby organization to the next step. CFT Inc was formed and we obtained 501(c)3 status as a US Federally recognized non-profit charity. So now we get to celebrate our first anniversary as a non-profit charity! This gives us the advantage of being a tax-deductible charity providing coupons to our military family, as well as the only one that send the coupons directly to the families of our military.
What a wonderful year it has been! Coups For Troops continues to match military families with US donors to send unwanted and expired coupons directly to their homes overseas on military bases. In the past year, CFT has added over 1,000 new military families to receive coupons and over 2,000 new donors! This is building on the 4 years prior and over countless other families who have been in our program.
As many of you know, Coups For Troops has always been a self funded volunteer operation, which our donors funding all of the postage to get over a ton of coupons shipped overseas each year. This is done completely free of charge to our military families. Our volunteers have done this out of the kindness of their hearts and believe in our mission of supporting those who protect us.
Going forward for the next year and beyond, we would like expand our program to reach out to every family stationed overseas which would like to receive coupons. We would like to help some of our volunteers to be able to fund additional packages of coupons overseas. We would like to expand to provide other services to our military families stationed overseas, as they express their needs. We are excited to be able to grow CFT and we can’t wait to see what the next year has in store for us!
If you would like to hear more about our volunteer opportunities or how you or your company could partner with us to help with postage, please contact us at info@coupsfortroops.org.