HonorAndThank.com - Honor COVID Health Heroes

EasyEventPlanning.com has created a platform that allows anyone to reach out to COVID-19 heroes with a heartfelt personal message, photo or video: HonorAndThank.com.  These first responders are risking their lives – and the lives of their families at home – to save strangers. Some have already given their lives.  

Never before in history – not during wartime or on 9-11 or when confronting a school shooter – has a hero been asked to potentially sacrifice the lives of their loved ones in addition to their own. They have a gut-wrenching decision to make every day and we desperately need them to keep showing up. Our lives depend on it.  They deserve and need two minutes of our time.

They are now suffering from a toxic combination of depression and anxiety.  Some have now taken their own lives.  Depression causes 490 million missed days of work in the US every year.  Our healthcare system is really at risk if these people start calling in to work with any frequency. They need our help to be able to help us.  This platform allows them to tap into needed support at the moment they need it the most.

These front-line warriors are both the visible and invisible heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Right now, they include the doctors and nurses we see in the hospitals and clinics and all the people behind the scenes—those who work in labs, food service, janitorial, security and so many others keeping these facilities running.  We very much want to expand this to include EMS units and nursing home facilities but need your help.

Given that the event industry has been temporarily devastated and we rely on vendor advertising (from caterers, venues, DJs, etc) to pay our bills, we had to launch this effort with extremely limted funds.  We built a site within our event site (HonorAndThank.com forwards to a landing page at EasyEventPlanning.com) to save money on hosting and design and we purchased a list of as many facilities as we could afford - about 12,500 hospitals across the country.   Each hospital has its own page for messages.  Anyone can follow a facility so they know when new messages are received.  
 
The effort is managed entirely by volunteers - 99% of whom are college students.  The $10,000 will go toward: 1) expanding the scope of the directory to include tens of thousands of pages to so our EMS units and nursing home staff is properly recognized, 2) hosting and other website expenses incurred for this intiative.  If additional funds are secured, we would build additional features, possibly hire someone to help manage more volunteers and advertise the site.  We will detail in updates what money was spent and what it was spent on.    

We greatly appreciate your support!

Kathleen Kilmer, CEO of EasyEventPlanning.com