Starting and Celebrating Small is a Big Deal
Starting “small” isn’t really in our cultural DNA.
We’re raised to “dream big.” Our national heroes are athletes, activists, and entrepreneurs who made it “big.”
Our icons are best sellers, champions, gold medalists, and billionaires.
We don’t get to see the small beginnings, the tiny steps that lead to something impactful, the daily minutiae that add up to a life of meaning.
But “small” is exactly where we’re starting, and it’s precisely what we’re celebrating.
The big moments.
When you attend a military promotion ceremony, retirement, homecoming, or change of command - any occasion with a lot of pomp and circumstance - you’re usually there to celebrate a big achievement.
Those events are, rightfully so, a big deal.
They honor the efforts and achievements of our military personnel.
While highly visible, those big events, with all their fanfare, can’t capture the full picture that brought someone to that moment.
Indeed, when you’re a spouse who’s unpacking boxes (again), or starting fifth grade in your third elementary school, those “big” moments don’t loom as large as the small steps you’ve got to take to support a service member getting there.
Celebrating the small moments.
One of the key reasons we started The Ready Room Project was to celebrate these “small” moments that make up so much of military family life.
We want spouses to know that we see something big in their “small” accomplishments:
Navigating a complex medical system.
Taking care of home repairs and car maintenance.
Supporting their kids’ academic and athletic pursuits.
Serving as primary caregivers (often on their own).
Pursuing continuing education, sacrificing income, and pivoting careers.
We want military kids to know we see something big in their “small” accomplishments, too:
Making a new friend in a community where they know they’ll say goodbye to them.
Trying out for teams in brand new places.
Muscling their way through the isolation of showing up at a new school mid-year.
Helping mom or dad out by taking out the trash, or picking up the living room.
Waving goodbye to a parent for an unknown amount of time.
Their daily efforts may seem small when viewed up close, but they add up to something big over time: big sacrifices, big disruptions, a big ask from our military community.
Starting small.
As much as we want to celebrate these families in big ways, the reality of starting a nonprofit, or anything for that matter, is that you have to start small.
We always knew our first project would benefit the kids on base in Lemoore, California.
Having lived there for a combined 24+ years, we understood the significance of this place, and how hard it can be on the families who are stationed there.
For those of us who come from bigger cities, Lemoore is a humbling place.
It’s rural and remote, located dead smack in the middle of California’s central valley, hundreds of miles from the state’s big cities to the north and south.
It’s a small place with a big mission.
Lemoore is home to the Navy’s west coast fleet of fighter jets and over 6,500 active duty military personnel.
There’s a lot to love in Lemoore, but not without drawbacks:
Travel to visit extended family is difficult and expensive.
California’s real estate and gas prices are much higher than national averages.
There’s limited access to many educational and extracurricular opportunities which are more readily available in bigger cities.
We wanted to do something big to let these folks know we appreciate them, but we needed to start small.
Our first project.
Once we had a few thousand dollars’ worth of donations, we contacted a dear friend still living in Lemoore.
I asked her what kids needed for the start of school. Could we cobble something together for them?
She thought about it for just a minute, then said “What about insulated lunch boxes?”
Okay, I said.
“Nice ones,” she said.
She didn’t want these kids to get a second-rate lunch box. Me either.
She told us that some kids took their lunch to school in Ziploc bags or shopping bags. And with temperatures in the valley well over 100 degrees, that’s not keeping food safe.
So, that’s where we started.
Within a week, we pulled the trigger and purchased 120 insulated lunch boxes.
We advertised the giveaway at back to school night on base, gathered parents’ requests, and prioritized distributing the lunch boxes to junior sailors’ families.
It felt kind of small. What good would 120 lunch boxes do?
But when we saw the pictures of Lacy and Amanda delivering cases of lunch boxes, this “small” effort looked big, and we celebrated those 120 military kids who have something in their hands that will keep their food safe throughout the day.
