On Saturday Sept 26 -The South Bay Sunrise Rotary club of Torrance hosts their 6th
Annual RAT RIDE. This is our second year helping guide the riders. The race consist of several distances from 15 miles to 61 miles throughout many of the South Bay communities- It has a little bit for everyone, including a nice ride along the beach.
Our job is to cover the Marina Del Rey section which consists of nine locations where our vets and their families will flag our riders and direct to their next destination. WHOA and the Rotary have built an exemplary partnership with community leaders to help our Combat Wounded. They have adopted us and we get an opportunity to educate and introduce them to our vets and their challenges.
THIS IS SOMETHING PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW when it comes to helping vets – The mega foundations have become so large and have so many layers between the givers and the receivers that they become slow to help and often times ineffective. By eliminating some of those layers and interactions directly with community leaders we can all do a better job. We at WHOA are firm believer that the resource we need are in the community. To the untrained eye it may seen to just be a bunch of people standing on a corner with a flag saying go this way. But in reality it’s working to fight depression, isolation, building fellowship, educating and fundraising for the much needed funding for our programs–this is how we do it and it works.
There is no other way to build fellowship among our wounded vets and their families other than to bring them together, and do it consistent and often and include the community. Letting them see, meet and talk to those young men and women we sent into combat is very important—The way this club has embraced our guys speaks volumes for the club. — A huge thanks from all of us at WHOA to The South Bay Sunrise Rotarians for giving us the opportunity to be a part of this great event.