My apologies on this delayed update, I’ve been traveling over the last 9 days and trying to get caught up. Halen and his wife, Clare, were gracious enough to carry the latest round of supplies to Rockport and Tivoli over the last couple weekends.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BYtV2tEAUq0/?taken-by=johnnydanderpants

In addition to these supplies, they also took a couple of bags of clothes, personal hygiene supplies, and toys to give to the family who lost everything during the storm. They were generously donated to the Griffin School, an effort led by two great Texans and close friends, Thomas Schiefer and Meghann Rosales. Thomas will be joining us this week as we head back down to Tivoli and Rockport tonight.

We’ve received another list of supplies from Angie, our contact in Tivoli:

• Cooking oil
• Laundry detergent
• Dish soap

A little less than half of the donations (~$875) remain and the strategy is to space it out and remain flexible to accommodate weekly needs. At some point, I’ll post a table with all of our expenditures not just for transparency, but also for educational value.

The main lesson in our efforts has been how important maintianing a local contact for up-to-date information on needs throughout a long period of disaster recovery. Though donations pouring in, Angie told us that many of the items are not needed and require storage and volunteer time to organize.

Finally and tragically, fires in the Western U.S., a large earthquake in Mexico and two other hurricanes that made landfall in Florida, Puerto Rico and multiple Caribbean nations over the last couple of weeks mean there are many others who need aid and support. If you know of any reliable and interesting charity work going on for those places, please share them with me so we can network and support those efforts.

Thanks again everyone! More soon.