Military-themed phone charity makes bold goal

[CommunityEditor]

At the holidays, for a service member 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 cell phone 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 cell phone lying around; they’d probably donate it to the right cause; and they’d probably 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 cell phones, 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,” said 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 the 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 ask for more phones.

CPFS collects at least 50,000 a month, more than all but a few companies in the nation. (Its recycler says it just passed Wal-Mart.) 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, Alaska.

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. service members in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. That would cost about $750,000 — half of all they’ve raised during the past three years.

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



Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...qcalls_071127/
Cell Phones for Soldiers: http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/