San Diego County is home to more than 110,700 active-duty service members and 240,000 veterans, making it one of the largest concentrations of military personnel in the country. San Diego is the home to 118,300 family members, of which 60.7 percent are children, which represents 7.6 percent of San Diego County’s total population.
Unfortunately, incidence of divorce and child abuse among military families is considerably higher than the general population. Many veterans struggle with mental health issues and nearly 1,000 are experiencing homelessness, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
DG Don Fipps has as one of his goals this year to establish a committee to track the activities and events assisting military members and veterans supported by Rotary Clubs in the district and at the same time enabling awareness and participation in these activities. He also wanted to provide the ability for Rotarians to volunteer at events to assist our local military members and veterans. That vision resulted in the formation of the District Military Coordination Committee (DMCC) chaired by Rotarians Mike Fuqua (Rancho Bernardo) and Jim Mendelson (Fallbrook).
Several Rotarians from around the district have joined the committee, and they have been meeting for several months to organize their activities. They quickly realized that there is a lot of support to our military and veteran community in the district and the first need was to develop a way to provide an opportunity for Rotarians to submit events, track the events and record them for posterity. They also felt it was important to help Rotarians find resources to potentially help veterans in the community. Since volunteering is an important part of everything we do, they wanted to develop a method for Rotarians to volunteer for events. From these needs was born the new DMCC website.
We’d like each club in the district to designate a point of contact to help us coordinate military and veteran issues so we’re asking each club to fill out the section of the website that is collecting this info. Also, please let us know any issues you encounter and ideas for making it better. We also encourage you to submit events for publication and volunteer where appropriate. And of course, spreading the word to all Rotarians in District 5340 is important.
We’d like each club in the district to designate a point of contact to help us coordinate military and veteran issues so we’re asking each club to fill out the Resource Contact Form. Also, please let us know any issues you encounter and ideas for making it better. We also encourage you to submit events for publication and volunteer where appropriate. And of course, spreading the word to all Rotarians in District 5340 is important.
Resource Contact Form
When you check out the website you will see our first big event that we are very proud to announce at this time. This Memorial Day and every Memorial Day in the future, Rotarians from District 5340 and their families and friends will have the opportunity to place small American flags at every gravesite at Miramar National Cemetery named Operation Flags for Vets. Rick Clark from the La Jolla Golden Triangle club has been the inspiration and driving force to make this significant event happen and we can’t thank him enough. To accomplish this task, we are procuring 22,000 flags and we’re going to need 200-300 volunteers to both place the flags on May 25 and remove them on May 28. Both days will have their own event and you can volunteer for both or either by filling out the form below. We hope you can come out and help us honor our fallen heroes!
Volunteer Form
Finally, we are just getting started. On the contact page of the website is a list of our current committee members. If you have interest to join us, let us know. If you have ideas that we can use to further help our military members and veterans, let us know. If your club is doing an event or activity to support our military members and veterans, make sure you get it documented on the website. The DMCC meets once a month and hope to build this committee and this effort into a major component of District 5340.