KILLEEN, Texas — Operation Phantom Support has been close to closing for months, but luckily their doors are still open. They’re still able to provide things like school supplies through their program called "Operation Resupply".
For years, Operation Phantom Support has been helping active-duty military, veterans, first responders, and their families in times of need.
While key programs like their food pantry and thrift store are still operating normally, others have been cut.
”We had to cut back on our car repair program, our tire replacement program and a little bit of our birthday cake program,” said CEO and Founder of OPS, John Valentine.
“Just because we had a lot of birthdays in the summer months, and we had to limit it to the amounts of cakes we could do each month.”
In past years, OPS relied on nearly 2,000 monthly donors paying $20 a month — a number that is now down to around 300.
”I’ve been doing a lot of reaching out to a lot of businesses, a lot of individual donors who donated to us in the past, to see if they could help subsidize us while for the month while we continue to see if we can raise the amount of donors, we’re in need of,” Valentine said.
Luckily, with school starting in a couple of weeks, they haven’t had to cut their backpack and school supplies program Operation Resupply.
”We did have a really good drive last year,” said Linda Valentine, with Operation Phantom Support.
“We have a lot of hold over that we can give out this year.”
With much of the school supplies they give out to the kids of military and first responder families coming from last year’s donations, they are still in need of some key items.
”We’ve gotten quite a few backpacks in, but what we’re really in need of is composition notebooks and lose-leaf paper,” Linda Valentine said.
These are items they would normally be able to purchase themselves if their number of monthly donors wasn’t so low.
”The $20 that people donate to us helps us keep all these programs going,” Linda Valentine said.
“A little bit of the funding goes to each program to keep it going throughout the year.”
Now their goal is to reach 2,000 monthly donors of just $20 a month by the end of August.
That $20 can not only feed a full family of four for an entire month, but it helps keep these programs like Operation Resupply going.
