History
After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, founder Carolyn Blashek felt the need to aid the war on terrorism. Starting from her house in California, the charity now encompasses churches, schools, businesses and service groups all over the country donating items and writing letters to service members through Operation Gratitude.
Since November 2003, Operation Gratitude has conducted its Assembly Drives in the California Army National Guard Armory in Van Nuys, California.
Blashek and Director of Operations Charlie Othold personally delivered the 300,000th care package to Iraq in January, 2008.
U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos personally delivered the 600,000th package on Christmas Day, 2010 in Sangin, Afghanistan.
Read more about this topic: Operation Gratitude
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“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
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“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)