Thanks for your interest in the National Home and its Awareness Week. What is Awareness Week really about?

Let me tell you what Awareness Week is not:

It's not about you helping the National Home. 

It's not about fundraising.  Although, donations are always appreciated and needed.

Oddly, it's not about awareness either.  Awareness simply means people know about the National Home.  What Awareness Week is really about is:

Helping children and families in your own community.

It's about the National Home being a resource for you.

It's about doing the right thing for the children and families of your comrades and sisters.

It's about you making a difference in the life of a child or family of our war veterans and deployed servicemen and women.

You can provide assistance and connection to supportive services including services unique for veterans in your own community nationwide by telling someone who needs help to call the National Home Helpline.

You can help children and youth needing someone to care for them by having their guardian call the National Home Helpline.  The children and youth may be able to live in one of 40 homes with loving supervision from trained child care staff.

You can provide an opportunity for single parent families in crisis to recover and build a better life by having the parent call the National Home.  Sometimes, the family may have the chance to live in the National Home's community campus for a time.

Odds are you know one or more soldiers that have been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan or some other part of the world.  Did you know you can help military families during deployment by using the National Home?   Deployed military members' children or their spouses with children can live at the National Home when an approved family plan isn't working out.  Have them call the Helpline.

Tragically, many of our servicemen and women return home with severe injuries.  These disabled veterans who become VFW members can pursue VA Voc Rehab while living at the National Home with his or her family because sometimes it?s just impossible for a veteran to do Voc Rehab and support a family at the same time.  If you know a family in this situation, use the National Home to help them.

Everywhere, in every state and every city, there are children and families bearing some type of additional cost of war.  It doesn't matter if they are impacted by today's war or another generation's war.  What matters is that not one of them is forgotten or ignored.  The National Home can help these people in your hometown through our toll-free Helpline.  Extensive assistance, guidance and sometimes just a listening ear are available.   The National Home is wherever you are.

So what does all of this add up to?  It's you, your friends, your Post, your Auxiliary using the VFW National Home for Children to be a part of America caring for the children and families of its veterans.