Marine Corps Base Quantico -- Staff Sergeant Kimberly Taylor and her husband Gunnery Sgt. Brendan Runyun, serving at Marine Corps Air Facility (MCAF) aboard Quantico, never thought they would need the help of a Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) charity. However, fate had something in store for the pair that they could not have anticipated. At 24 weeks of pregnancy, Taylor was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a complication of pregnancy indicated by extremely high blood pressure. The complication was so intense that Taylor began having organ failure. She was sent to a special hospital 2 ½ hours away from her home. No one knew how long she would have to be in the hospital, and her husband, mother and her other child needed a place to stay close to the hospital.
“Driving 2 ½ hours one way from my home to the hospital every day was not an option for us,” Taylor said about the dire situation. “We needed help.” They found help through CFC organization that provides housing, meals and transportation in these types of situations.
“If it wasn’t for them, I would have been stuck in a hotel room with the family, which would have put us under financial strain,” Runyun said. As it was, the charity provided an apartment-like setting where there were kitchens available and volunteers often cooked dinner for the guests. This also helped ease the financial burden of having to eat out every night.
“They did a lot more for us than what they said they would do,” Taylor said.
The Combined Federal Campaign is the official workplace giving campaign of the federal government. Through CFC, civilian federal employees and service members can give donations to hundreds of charitable organizations or even choose one organization that they want their donation to go to. Since money is given to the CFC it makes it easy to give and allows civilian employees and service members the chance to make a difference in someone’s life and their communities. This year’s campaign runs Sept. 1 through Dec. 31.
The CFC helps Michael Hancock, also a MCAF employee, each year by providing Holiday gifts for his distribution organization in Stafford, which screens families and provides them with a Christmas to remember. This is all made possible by a CFC charity, which collects the gifts and then sends them to Hancock’s distribution organization. “They wouldn’t be able to do what they do without money from CFC,” Hancock said. “People see [them] getting gift donations, but what people don’t understand is how those gifts get into homes,” he said. Money is needed to rent space in warehouses to store the gifts before they are distributed to families, and for trucks to pick up the donations for storage. He wants to encourage people to give to the CFC during the campaign in order to help.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Carlile Page, MCAF, said he was affected by CFC when a CFC charity stepped in to help his mom when she was most in need. Her house in South Carolina burned down and she had nowhere to go.
The charity paid for a hotel room for her so she had a place to stay until she got money from the insurance company, and also cut her a check to buy essentials such as clothes that were lost in the fire.
“I didn’t even know they did this,” Page said. “I am grateful because I didn’t have to put her up in a hotel myself (which would have strained finances).” Since Page is a Marine, it also helped with his readiness, since he didn’t have to worry about what his mom was going to do until the insurance came through. The help given to his mom made him able to concentrate on his work better.
This year’s CFC begins Sept. 1. To give to this year’s CFC campaign contact your unit representative.