It’s a reflective time of year. The days leading up to Christmas, and then springing into a new year, bring both anticipations and anxieties but, always, also opportunities for reflection. It’s been a great year for Catch-A-Dream. We are blessed not only with the opportunity to extend a message of Christian HOPE to children (and their families) who face life-threatening medical conditions, but also with friends and supporters in all sectors of our communities, across North America and beyond. And it is with the help of those friends and supporters that we are able to stay on our singular mission and deliver encouragement and hope to hurting families through hunting and fishing adventures.
Snapshot from our 2016 Christmas Open House
2016 has been a busy year, and milestones have been reached in many aspects. It is, in fact, a little mind boggling to consider the breadth of activities, opportunities, and accomplishments with which we’ve been blessed! Our Friends of Catch-A-Dream program has been exceptionally active and successful, with grass-roots efforts generating resources and awareness at the local level in many states. To try to list them all here would do injustice to some as, invariably, one or more may not come immediately to mind; but each and every Friends committee, local organization, school or church group, fishing or archery tournament committee, or any of many “loosely banded supporters who want to help make a difference” with which we have the privilege to work is valued and cherished. We see the real “fabric of America” at work in these groups, large and small, who passionately go about helping us extend the message of HOPE that encompasses our entire mission and vision. And for that we are grateful and immeasurably humbled.
Behind the scenes we’ve worked hard to totally revamp our webpage to ensure that it is responsive to mobile devices and, thus, available and efficient for all users with displays of any size. We’ve adopted a new “look” and added new features to make the webpage more dynamic, current and even interactive. We hope you’ll like it! And, we’ve added an Instagram page to complement our Facebook page where we seek to provide images to keep our friends and families tuned in to what is happening with Catch-A-Dream.
But most importantly, we’ve stayed on our mission and concentrated our greatest intensity and focus toward delivery of outstanding child/family hunting and fishing experiences through which these children can glean that message of HOPE that we seek to share. We’ve just completed child trip number 45 for the year 2016; that’s 45 children and families who have experienced what we call “The Catch-A-Dream Way” in the context of a hunting or fishing adventure. To really appreciate the magnitude of the year, we can dissect the numbers a little.
38 Boys and 7 girls
29 Hunting Trips and 16 fishing trips
Children from 26 different states
Adventures took place in 17 different states
So, as you close out your year, and then open a new one, we hope that you’ll take time to reflect as well. Take time to appreciate the ways that He has worked and provided in your own lives, families, business and endeavors. As you consider Christmas giving, or year-end donations, we hope that you’ll consider us. We pledge to be good stewards of the resources with which you provide us. And there are many, creative ways to give, some of which don’t even cost you! Programs like Amazon Smile, Kroger Rewards and GoodSearch actually make donations on your behalf. Many companies have matching gift programs where they will match an employee’s monetary donation, while others will make donations based upon an employee’s volunteer service hours.
We rejoice in the success and prosperity The Lord has brought Catch-A-Dream this year, and look forward to what He has in store for 2017. We are thankful that he has decorated our tapestry with friends like you, and we sincerely wish to each and every one of our friends a very Merry Christmas season and a prosperous and Happy New Year!
