Dear Friends –
As I write this, our team is spread out across the globe and internally in the country. Steve and Vik are continuing their fund-raising tour of the US, talking about our work in Ukraine and their experiences living there through the war. They have already been in Cleveland, Phoenix, Buffalo, New York City and are in Chicago now with follow-on stops in Portland and Seattle. If you’re in one of those areas and want to hear their amazing stories, find all the details on IG at @forcaukraine. Yuliia, Bohdan, and Susanna are all in Ukraine, doing their own work and helping prepare for our upcoming mission in September. It is an unending list of tasks, trying to secure a vehicle, training locations, and trainees. Finch, despite not going on this trip with us, remains committed to helping out – and is currently looking to secure a venue in or around Boulder for a talk on 3 AUG (if anyone has a venue they could suggest that fits our budget, please let me know). Similarly, Emily is in Colorado working on our budget, improving the website, ordering materials, and generally picking up my slack as I sit in Oregon on a wildfire. As I joked with my team, the days are long and extremely hot, I sleep and eat in a tent, I haven’t changed since I’ve been here, and there are smoke columns all over – I am doing my own prep work for another trip to Ukraine in the summer! In short – the team is working extremely hard to ensure that we are ready to do what we do best – teach advanced pre-hospital trauma medicine across Ukraine, and arm providers with both the skills and the right tools to do so effectively. Right now, our budget sits about where our previous trips have landed – and while we are happy for that as it allows us to launch this mission, we continue to look for ways to make our work more sustainable, and these efforts less hand to mouth.
We are so appreciative of you – the people who believe in us and our mission. As you have seen in the news recently, the work we do remains as critical as ever. The recent strike on the children’s hospital where patients were receiving cancer treatment in the middle of Kyiv, the capital, just underscores how mass casualty events can happen anywhere and at any time in Ukraine. I was deeply moved by the images of the responders – professionals and bystanders – who rushed to help. We have trained Ukrainian DSNS – their 911 EMS/Fire service – as well as Ukrainian civilians for just this kind of event. I just never could have imagined it would be a children’s hospital that was the target. We have also recently received a request for help raising money for 2,500 tourniquets from our friends at Dnipro Tourniquet to supply to medics in the field. This is a nearly impossible ask for us as it would wipe out our entire budget, but we are fully committed to doing out part to help them reach this goal and continue to supply the best tourniquets in the world to the people who need them the most. Sadly, this is indicative of the state of the conflict – I don’t think the US military used that any tourniquets in 20 years of the Global War on Terror.
If you are new here, thank you. You are now part of the Força family (however, if you don’t want to be, just shoot me an email – this is literally just me emailing you, no bots. Yes, we are that flat). There is a direct line from you, through us as the conduits of training and material, to end-users, who then take those skills and tools to save lives in the field. We know this to be true – we have received feedback from medics that they effectively applied a tourniquet supplied in a training to stop an otherwise life-ending bleed. Other medics have expressed gratitude for helping them learn IVs, or how to transfuse blood. While we get that feedback directly, it is truly directed at you. Without you, there is no Força effort in Ukraine. You make everything we do possible, and there are not enough, or the appropriate words to say thank you. You allow us to help save lives. You save lives.
On behalf of all of us spread around the globe, we thank you for being part of our family. From me personally, there is no way to fully express my appreciation.
I am humbled and grateful – Mike
