Dear Friends,
August 5, 2025
Thank you for providing your contact information and expressing your interest in Grieving Grandmothers of Military Suicides’ work. Your support is crucial to our success. While producing a monthly newsletter is still in the planning stages, I will try to keep you abreast of our efforts to spread awareness and engage in advocacy at least once a month.
To this end, I would like to share what has happened since we launched six weeks ago:
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- We had our first board meeting.
- I have written to several major newspaper/media outlet journalists who are focused on military/DoD/Pentagon reporting, and will continue to do so.
- Six members of our family, including Meg, Yoni and Ella – Noah’s parents and sister, participated in an event sponsored by TAPS, The Good Feet Store, and The Flying Squirrels (baseball team), in Richmond, Virginia, attended by survivors as well as a large crowd of baseball spectators, allowing us to share the stories of our lost loved ones.
- I have been sharing my website with friends, encouraging them to engage in advocacy.
- I have been working with a social media consultant to develop effective ways to use social media tools for our purposes.
- I attended a TAPS-sponsored webinar on advocacy (and registered to participate in TAPS Advocacy Week in DC in September. Stay tuned for more about this experience in the October update.)
- I had two opportunities to speak to small groups about the organization and share the GGMS website with attendees.
I am deeply grateful to those of you who have made a donation, written to lawmakers, and shared the website with others. Lawmakers begin to pay attention when they get multiple communications focused on the same topic, in our case, ending self-harm behaviors among our service members, so please continue to reach out to them.
Please note: 100% of donations go towards website hosting and maintenance, advocacy work, office supplies and equipment, printing services, and postage. We pay no rent or utilities (my office is in my home), and we neither get nor pay wages.