"Putting Veterans back to work"

The knock that changed my life…
“Sir, do you have any work that I can do for you around your home or yard?” Here was a combat Marine who just gotten off the plane from Iraq that night only to find his wife & two toddlers without electricity and transportation due to having lost her job & unable to make the car payments.

My heart jumped in my throat and I quickly invited him in to find something for him to do.

I then started thinking my freedom depends on the backbones of young men and women just like this.  The thought of their families living out of cars and without electricity made my stomach turn.  Here I was living in the life of luxury because of the freedom this young man was providing me.  It was a pleasure to be able to provide some assistance to him in knowing that I was now able to help a young Marine and his family so they would 1 step further in turning their lights back on.

I realized after this occurrence that this Marine was not alone.  We never realized how little our military was earning for their service and never imagined that something like this was possible.

We determined that night to build a free job posting board on the internet for the Marines so they would be able to do jobs for local residents.

You have to realize I’m an old retiree with enough skills to turn on the computer and so I opened the yellow pages.  $14,000 was the price tag just to get started with a website; I didn’t have this kind of money. But my wife and I had just made our final mortgage payment.

We got down on our knees and began to ask the Lord for his guidance.  “Do you want us to sell our house to begin a ministry to the troops?” That was about as far as we got. Then the phone rang.

Reluctantly, I answered the phone. It was a realtor canvassing our area. “Hello, I have a buyer interested in purchasing a house in your area. Would you be interested in us coming by and showing your home?” — Less than an hour later, we shook hands on the sale.

Now think about this, we hadn’t even put a for sale sign in our yard and within 48 hours we had sold our home raising enough money to start helping Marines.

Things begin to fall into place rather quickly within weeks 500+ Marines found jobs in our first month!  Appreciation and praises began pouring in. Not just from the Marines, but from the residents that hired them too.  The media had a field day.

Soon calls were coming in from all the branches of military asking if they could get jobs off of our free job board too.  We then changed the theme from www.HireMarines.com to www.HirePatriots.com.

In the San Diego region on average we employ on average 800+ a month of military members with our 1 day jobs and we have partnered with another national company that has over 400,000 jobs all with mainly fortune 500 companies for anyone to see for free.

Despite all the success we are having with helping so many military families, companies are no longer going to job fairs we once hosted and our income has stopped as well.  We can’t stay alive without donations to our nonprofit.

We have lived like missionaries since selling our home in 2004 and put 97% of the money raised into marriage counseling to military members coming back from combat deployments.

You see we found out that 9 out of 10 of the families with young children were getting divorces due to the severe stress of watching other families suffer as their Marines casket came home from overseas.

Your donation will save a life.

“The Great American”
Mark Baird

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