Positivity: Cell Phones for Soldiers

I heard about this on the Laura Ingraham Show yesterday, and was blown away by what the two teens, a brother and sister, have accomplished.
From Norwell, Massachusetts (Cell Phones for Soldiers home page):

Updated 10d ag0 (Nov. 27)

Teens help troops phone home

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.

In past wars, the government engineered support. Now it’s mostly informal and decentralized, he says: “The things that have been most successful” — such as CPFS — “have just bubbled up.”

CPFS collects at least 50,000 phones a month, more than all but a few companies in the nation. The 7,000 drop-off locations range from AT&T retail stores and Liberty Tax Service offices to Fabulous Freddy’s Car Wash in Las Vegas and Fine Line Auto Repair in Anchorage.

The organization sends about 25,000 one-hour phone cards overseas each month. This holiday season the Bergquists are working toward a bold goal: a phone card a month for each of the more than 185,000 U.S. servicemembers in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. That would cost about $750,000, half of all they’ve raised in three years.

But Bob Bergquist, the youths’ father and CPFS overseer, says that with hundreds of millions of cellphones sitting in Americans’ drawers and attics, “We haven’t even scratched the surface.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.