A generation of Hope

Cell Phones for Soldiers was started by 16 year old Brittany Bergquist and her 15 year old brother Robbie, when they were 12 and 13. We need the encouragement of children like these. If only we saw more of these honorable kids on our news, it would most likely move others to do the good things in life that should be done too.

At the holidays, for a soldier at war, there's nothing like a phone call home. Brittany and Robbie Bergquist have provided more than $1.4 million worth of them — 24 million precious minutes.
The Bergquists are teenage siblings who didn't even own a cellphone in 2004, when they heard that an Army reservist faced a $7,600 bill for making calls home from Iraq.

They founded Cell Phones for Soldiers based on three ideas: Most people have an old, inactive cellphone lying around; they'd probably donate it to the right cause; and they'd agree that, as Brittany puts it, "Everyone has a right to call home."

In three years, an effort that began with a piggybank raid and a car wash has turned into a booming home front charity — one that has turned its founders' lives upside down and won them devoted friends throughout the military and beyond.

Cell Phones for Soldiers solicits unwanted cellphones, sells them to a recycler for about $5 each and uses the money to buy pre-paid phone cards that are shipped to the war zone.

"We take for granted our ability to call home and speak to our families," says Brittany, 16. "The troops don't do that. They appreciate what we're doing. That's what sparks us to do more."

During the past three years, CPFS has given out more than 400,000 phone cards, many in envelopes its young founders addressed, stuffed and licked themselves. "A lot of tongue paper cuts," says Brittany, who appeared with her 15-year-old brother Monday on ABC's daytime talk show, The View, to tout the program.

Their bottom-up initiative typifies how home front Americans support troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, says Morton Ender, a U.S. Military Academy sociologist who has studied how troops communicate with home.

Read more....

There's always use for an old cell phone, isn't there.
Thanks