Hurricane Harvey Flash Drive
September 8, 2017 -
Dear Great Hearts Families, Colleagues and Partners,
Our Harvey Relief FLASH DRIVE was a rousing success! The effort put forth by our students, families, staff, volunteers and moving partners with less than 24 hours to respond, was amazing!
Together, we brought in and consolidated over 20,000 pounds of goods today alone. After many students and teachers helped load it all up, this bounty of material goodwill was transported and unloaded by 6 cheerful guys from Just-in-Time Moving, a company owned by a Great Hearts Arete parent who enthusiastically donated four moving trucks and crews, and planned the ground transport logistics. The donations are now staged at a hangar provided by Ross Aviation at the Scottsdale Airport. With the help of AERO Bridge, a company that mobilizes private pilots who are willing to donate their time, planes, and fuel to help the disaster delivery efforts, the first plane will fly out of Scottsdale today. The initial plan was to use four planes to transport everything to Texas, but with the tremendous response, it will take 12 planes (or trips) and one long-haul moving truck to move everything in a timely fashion. Everything delivered by plane will arrive in Beaumont, TX by Saturday, September 9th. Children and their families will greet the planes on the tarmac to pick up the supplies and then deliver them to Port Arthur, TX, one of the hardest hit areas.
You can see local TV coverage here, an article here, and we have amassed a number of photographs from the academies and at the Ross Aviation hangar that you can view here. There is also a video summary of the day that you can view here.
I am so thankful to our partners at AERO Bridge, Ross Aviation, and Just-in-Time Moving for working with us on such short notice, and I am so proud and grateful for the responsive leadership in each of our academies and for our collective, rapid, activation and generosity to lend a helping hand in this time of desperate need for our Texan neighbors. It is truly heart-warming to be part of this community. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of the families who are enduring an overwhelmingly tragic situation in Texas … and for those in the path of the Hurricane Irma bearing down on Florida even now.
Thank you all, for answering the call!