Cindy Packard
Cindy Packard and her husband Blair are the founders of Care for Life, an NGO in Africa that, for the past 24 years, has seen unprecedented success in alleviating suffering, promoting self-reliance, and instilling hope for those families and villages living in extreme poverty.
Cindy helped research and create a unique program using local people to offer comprehensive training and mentoring in health and hygiene, sanitation, food security, home improvement, income generation, literacy, psycho-social well-being, and community participation.
Since its beginning, Care for Life has helped over 100,000 people, and according to Cindy, they are just getting started to help the 1 billion people still living in desperate poverty. “We don’t give handouts or create dependency – we share knowledge and create sustainable self-reliance. And we have the data to prove it.”
Care for Life was chosen as one of the ten “Best Practices in Global Health” for 2010 by the US State Department.
Cindy presented “The Family Preservation Program: Empowering Communities” at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2013.
Care for Life started in Mozambique, Africa, and is currently focused on sharing The Family Preservation Program with other organizations working to help those in extreme poverty.
Cindy has served 24 years on the Care for Life Board and is an advisor. She has been a Licensed Midwife in private practice in Arizona for 45 years.
Episode Transcription
Guiding Growth. Conversations with Community Leaders. In this podcast, we'll explore the human journey of leaders, their stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks and lessons learned. Come join us as we journey together and uncover the questions you've always wanted to know. This podcast is brought to you by the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, providing resources, connections and belonging for business professionals and modern moments, an event and meeting venue in the heart of Gilbert and at Gilbert Independent, your valley. net dedicated to serving readers with good community journalism. The Gilbert Independent is a nonpartisan newspaper, an online site that covers our town's institutions, development and events.
Subscribe and follow your valley. net Daily to stay up to date with latest local news. Sometimes we get some very unique conversations in this room and that happens usually with you Sarah. But today it's not all about you. It is not all about me and I honestly, this is going to be a beautiful journey and I can't wait to explore it. This guest grew up in Utah. She and her husband of now 235 years made their way first to North Carolina and then Arizona, they have lived in Gilbert since 20003 where they raised their seven Children who have graced them with 22000 grandchildren.
She is a licensed midwife with a private practice, a career she found after her second child was born and has delivered almost 257 babies. She and her family founded a nonprofit which helps to transform poverty stricken communities and families in Africa. That nonprofit is now celebrating 278 years, which has helped more than 100,000 people. Please welcome Cindy Packard. Welcome to the show, Cindy. Thank you so much. We're excited to have this conversation. We always start with what we call rapid fire. So you go first this time. Would you rather host a party for all your friends or enjoy a dinner for two, a dinner for two?
Here we go. Star Wars or Star Trek. Star Trek? Favorite color, green, winter or summer, summer. What did your mom call you when you were a child other than h you or get over here or? I don't remember a cute name, Cindy Cindy Lou. Sometimes? Ok. Ok. Favorite holiday Thanksgiving. Would you ever, maybe I should say, have you ever bungee jumped? No, in your teen years? What was your favorite movie? The Sound of Music? What is one thing you wish you enjoyed more exercise? That would be one thing.
And ok, last question is your glass half full or half empty. It is half full today today. Most days. Not every day. That's awesome. Every day at A PS. We're here to help you save energy and money. A PS solutions for business can help you make energy efficient upgrades, more affordable, find rebates at a ps. com/business rebates. Well, welcome. We have so much to talk about, but we always start in the very beginning. So help us take us back to the beginning of your journeys. Um Maybe home school, that kind of stuff back in the, the younger years.
Oh, gosh, that's so long ago. Um, grew up in Utah. Pretty typical. Um, my dad died when I just turned 13 and that was a big pivotal moment in my life. I have one brother that's eight years older than me and he was already gone. So, so my life changed pretty drastically at that point. Um, we used, my dad used to race horses and we had a, uh, you know, big house with a lot of land and all that changed. My mom had to sell that and, you know, we downsized a lot.
So my life changed a lot, but I was very, I was a happy kid. I grew up, I was a cheerleader in high school and did debate and I was involved in lots of things and I met my husband in the seventh grade in a band and I played the flute and he played the drums and, but we didn't date until we got to college. I also met my husband in band in high school. I did Kindred Spirits. Did you play the drums or? The flute? I played the flag.
Well, that's another episode right there. Ok. Ok. So you guys, you didn't date till after high school? And then how did you decide that you were more than friends? You know, it was, it was the Vietnam War. It was kind of a crazy time. People that didn't grow up in the sixties don't know how crazy it was. You know, it was the hippie movement and all of that. It was really crazy. And, um, they had lottery numbers for, when you went, you know, your number came up to go to the war.
So it was kind of a factor in the fact that we thought, well, let's just get married. We'd had a year of college and, um, it was probably a good thing. We didn't date in the seventh grader. We would have gotten married sooner. But, yeah, so we got married. We, uh, my husband finished, uh, college and then we went off to graduate school and that was in North Carolina. We, we were there, we had two kids by the time we went to graduate school and then we came back and settled in Gilbert and we, I loved Utah and I thought we'd stay there forever.
But he had a sister down here and so just come down and see how nice it is. And of course, we came down in February and the weather was beautiful and, and there was a lot of opportunities for physical therapy down here that we didn't think were available in Utah. So, yeah, we just made the big jump. And when I came down, I was seven months pregnant and we didn't have any air conditioning in our car and it was summer. And yeah, it was a different experience than the first trip.
But the trickery of Arizona, we were in an apartment in Phoenix for a while. And then we bought our first little home in Mesa. And um it was like the week before my daughter started kindergarten. So we've loved it ever since. I thank him all the time for bringing me to Arizona and out of the cold. OK. So you um in grad school after your second child, you read a book that changed the course of your plans. Can you talk, talk to us about that? You're talking about midwifery here, I think.
Yes, my husband um I started teaching natural childbirth classes back in those days. Uh childbirth was really medicated and women didn't have really uh a very good experience for the most part. And so he um brought me home a book and it was called Immaculate Deception. And it was about the beginning of midwifery in America basically. And that um there's an alternative way to have a baby without going to do all the drugs and everything that you know, had been kind of the common back at that time.
And so, yeah, I, I had a natural birth. I loved it so much. I started teaching childbirth classes and that led me to midwifery. I had done nursing. I didn't graduate from college because my husband left. I had two semesters left to go. So it was later that I finished my education when I came to Arizona and became a licensed midwife and I practiced for 45 years. Um here in Gilbert, I'm curious, what are some of the ways it's changed over those 45 years? And what are some of the misconceptions?
Um Well, it has changed in the fact that women have become empowered to make birth a personal um life changing affirming experience. And prior to that, it was just like, I'll just go to the hospital and do whatever they tell me and I'll be knocked out and I'll wake up when it's over. And so, um I am very aware that some of the misconceptions about homebirth are that it's not safe and who would do that? You know, who would take that risk? But if, if you work with a backup doctor, which I do, there's a hospital nearby.
We only take low risk moms. Um I'm a trained attendant. Um and in all the babies I've delivered in all these years, you know, we've, we've transported some, but they've, they've always had good outcomes and uh and it's, it's very empowering. So I'm, I've loved being a midwife. I've delivered a lot of my grandchildren and that's been really a highlight. Um, and it was, it really was midwifery that led me to Africa and led me to start the nonprofit that we have. Now. I had a friend who had gone there and she came back and said, do you realize the problem of maternal mortality in Africa?
And I really hadn't paid a lot of attention to that at the time. I, I knew Africa was really poor and I really didn't want to read the stories about it because they knew there was nothing I could do that would make a difference. And so when I started to look into it, when she said that I realized, uh, the statistics were horrible. One in seven women die of a pregnancy related complication in Africa and one in four Children under the age of five died. This was in 1999 when I first looked at it.
It's improved a little but not a lot. And so that's what led me to start care for life. So there had to be some sort of spark because a friend mentioning something, friends mention something all the time, but something sat within you to actually start researching that. Well, at first, I really just dismissed the whole idea. I was a busy mom at the time. I had, you know, six Children and they were busy and I figured, yeah, someday, someday, maybe I'll go back and look into that.
But, um, she asked me to pray about it and I did and I got a really strong feeling that I should go. And it came when I was reading an article in a magazine about the World Congress of Families and it was this little sentence there that said in some parts of Africa, over 573% of the babies are dying. And that's because no one's interested in training midwives anymore. And when I read that it just hit my heart and I thought I cannot, I cannot dismiss that. Yeah.
And so um I, I did a little research and the advice I got was to go to the highest level of government that I could get into in Africa and offer to help. Here's I'm a midwife, what can I do to help? And so basically we put together this little rag tag team. I took two of my teenage daughters and a translator and somebody to film it. But they were all young people. There were like six of us and I tried to contact some other organizations prior to getting there like some of the big aid organizations and no one would even return my call.
So I really just went, not knowing anything. We ended up going to Mozambique because there had been a huge hurricane that had come through and just devastated. There was flooding everywhere and there was a lady who had a baby in a tree during the flood. And so, um, our church was shipping a bunch of obstetrical supplies there. And I talked to some people on the ground and they said, oh, your midwife, maybe you can help with that. Typical, those supplies never even made it into the country.
But that was kind of the carrot that got me there. And the, the second day I was there, I made a contact on the street with a woman. And I said, you know, I'm a midwife. I just came kind of to see if there's anything I could do. And she said, oh, come to my house for dinner. My cousin is the Minister of Health and met him. He said, come to the office. The next day, I sat around with the whole uh council at the Ministry of Health and they said, I said I could deliver babies in a displacement camp if you wanted.
And he said, no, we want you to train the traditional birth attendants in our country. 80% of babies were born outside of the hospital and with women that were not trained really, they were just illiterate women that were from the villages and and doing the best they could. So that led to um us going on a very long journey up through the really remote areas of Mozambique. Um During this flood time, roads were washed out, we were stranded sometimes for days, waiting for a road to be made so that we could go through it.
And it was at that time that I really saw this level of poverty, extreme poverty, primitive poverty. Like, I could never even have imagined it. I'd seen poverty. We've been in South America, but this was a different kind of poverty. This was like, people had nothing, nothing. And they didn't even know the basics of what made them sick. Yeah. And I, because I don't think that we have a clear understanding if we haven't seen it. Can you paint a little bit of a picture? Sure. Sure. So, um, in a village, if you go into a village, I mean, you literally see it's just houses made of sticks and rocks.
Sometimes they'll do two layers of sticks and put rocks in between them. Um, pieces of just debris or whatever they can find to try and patch together a house. But the thing that's most, that was most striking to me was the despair. I mean, there was no hope. People were just sitting, there was garbage, there was people sitting under trees. Um There was just despair. There was just a really lack of hope. And everywhere I went, people when they saw that I was a white woman. They just come up and say, can you build me a school?
Can you, you know, get us food? Can you build us a health clinic? And, and I thought this is how they view us as people who come and just give and give and give these kinds of things. And I was really overwhelmed. I'm like, I'm here with these youth basically. And I, and I, I, I was really overwhelmed with that. It, there was this one meeting that they had sent us to try and find their traditional birth attendants and interview them or talk to them about. They wanted us to make 5000 birthing kits.
And her birthing kit basically consisted of a Ziploc bag with a shoelace to tie the cord, a razor blade to cut the cord, a piece of cloth that would be clean to lay on a yard square and a bar soap that was a birthing kit. And they even said we don't really have these supplies in the hospitals either. So could you also get us more than 5000 that we could use in our hospitals? So that paints a little bit of picture of what the health care situation was.
And so in this one village, um we we arrived to talk to uh the government and at that time, we were sitting there in this little room and, and it was a they were so welcoming. They poured water over our hands when we arrived. Even though it was late at night, we traveled all day on this very bad dirt road. When we got there, they were waiting for us. So we were sitting in this room and it starts to get darker and darker and darker and pretty soon it's pitch black and there is no light, there is not a light to turn on, even though there was a, a bulb hanging down.
But electricity had been cut off for, like, I, I don't know how long months, if not years and there wasn't even a candle. So we're sitting there in the pitch dark and I sort of had one of those out of body experiences where it's like, what am I doing here? And how did I get here? I was in the middle of nowhere and I remembered my friend Mary Ellen Edmonds years and years ago at that moment, she said in a talk that she'd given earlier, she said if, if you're using clean water and you turn off the water and you ask if there's, if God could send that clean water to someone in the world, if you saved it, he could do that.
And at that moment I thought I can do something. I don't know what, but I can do something. And they were talking about pencils and I thought, well, ok, I'll bring back some pencils anyway. Fast forward. I see this man under the tree and, and everyone's asking for things and, and finally I just walked over to him and he was an older man. You don't see a lot of older people. And I said, you know, of all the things that you need, if you could just boil it down to one thing, what would it be?
Because I'm just one woman. And he said, he thought for a minute and he said, we need knowledge. And that was a really big moment for me. I thought, I don't have to bring all this stuff. And he explained they had gone through colonization, you know. So basically they just, the Europeans came in and made slaves of Africa, basically, you know, shipped them out of uh to, to other parts of the world or made them slaves where they were, um there was no one educated when they finally left the Portuguese colonized Mozambique and so they speak Portuguese.
But when they left, there was no education and then there was a civil war that came in to basically try to take control and that didn't end until 1993 or four. And so those people really just had lost the ability to understand what made them sick or how to thrive or how to become self reliant again. And so that, that was what we did. I didn't have any money in the beginning and I didn't know how to do it. So I went home and I started researching and I just started reading about what had happened to Africa and basically billions of dollars have been spent.
And people, well, meaning people, you know, they want to buy dolls and they want to send clothes and all those things. But what has happened is it's created this culture of dependency and it hasn't led to self reliance of the people. There's a wonderful um documentary out called Poverty Inc Inc. It is like the business of poverty and how by shipping in all these things to these countries. We're basically um sabotaging their economy. And so we decided early on, we were going to do it differently. We weren't quite sure how but, but I hung on to that idea of knowledge.
And so I started with just high school kids and college age kids that could pay their way over. And I found this book called Facts for Life. 13 Essential Facts of Life that everyone in the world has a right to know. And it's just things like if, if a baby has diarrhea, you have to give it more fluid, not less safe motherhood, women need more food and more rest and what causes malaria and what causes cholera and the importance of clean water and using a latrine and having that away from your water source, just really basic stuff.
So we went into the schools and we started teaching that and we did that for a couple of years and was really helpful. I had some wonderful stories. We went to South Africa and throughout Mozambique and just taught in schools. But, but we can only do it in the summers basically when the kids were available. So after we did that a couple of times, we decided we needed to plant a flag. In fact, it was our care for life board that said, we don't want you going all over like that, that might not be safe.
You pick one area and let's go deep. So we picked the poorest area that we had seen and that was in the central part of Mozambique. And that's where we established our uh our nonprofit at that time. And we started teaching classes in a school that we established there. But we kind of quickly realized we did health and we did um gardening and how to plan a garden. And, and we realized that the best people could make it to the school. But there were these remote villages where the poverty was really extreme that no one was out there.
And so we changed our approach and we decided to take our teachers to the villages. And at the time, there was an orphanage there in town and nobody goes to Africa without learning about the orphans and falling in love with all the orphans. And there was an orphanage. And when we went there, it was full of babies. It had about 90 babies and they were just in cots just jammed in these rooms together and they had very few workers there. And when I got talking to the director, I said, what happened to these families?
She goes, oh, a lot of these Children have families. They, they could stay until they were two. I think she said a lot of them have families but they're so poor, they can't take care of them. So they bring them here so they don't die. And at that point, uh there were 11 million orphans in Sub Saharan Africa and it was projected to grow exponentially. Today. There are 55 million orphans in Sub Saharan Africa. So the idea of helping one orphanage, you know, giving them some clothes for the kids or diapers or whatever.
Suddenly we're like, mm no, that's not going to cut it. So what we decided to do was go back to the family of origin in those remote villages before they fell apart and figure out how we could keep that family together. And so facts for life classes um evolved into what we call the family preservation program and that's what we do now. And I want to explore a little bit um what that looks like. But I first want to go back to that very first trip that you took with your two daughters and youth and just talk a little bit about what you were feeling.
I'm probably trying very hard to suppress outwardly, but there had to be a sense of probably fear. Um What did that look? What were you experiencing on that first trip um with because you were responsible not only for your own safety but for the safety of these kids that were with you. I did fear it was just so different than anything I'd seen before. And so, you know, we fear what we don't understand, but it was actually really good to go on that long trip. We took a native with us who was from the village that we were headed to.
And, um, I didn't really feel fear. I felt awe. I would see women walking with, you know, those giant five gallon jugs that we bring water to sports events, they would put them on their head and walk with a baby on their back. You know, one hour, one way and one hour another way just to get water. That wasn't really all that clean. And when I and I saw people living in the most poverty stricken circumstances, but they were still, they were so resilient. You know, I'm like, I could never do that.
I could never do that if I don't have air conditioning in August, you know, I would, you know, melt, but I, I looked at what they did and I just felt like it was a perspective that I had never imagined, not only never seen but never even imagined that people could live like that. I remember seeing a woman who was paralyzed, just laying on a grass mat. There's no health care really. And I, I don't mean to make it, I don't mean to paint a picture that all of Africa is like that.
There are cities and in cities there's grocery stores and businesses and things. But that's not where the poor live, the poor live out in these remote areas. There's no jobs, there's no roads pretty much to get out there. And so that was the targeted population that we decided to, to work with was the extreme poor, the poorest of the poor. And when I came home I remember talking to other organizations and, you know, trying to reach out. Surely someone's got something that could help me. I wouldn't have to start from scratch.
But for the most part, the advice we got was, um you don't really want to work with the very poorest of the poor. You kind of want to go up a couple of levels, maybe work with those who are literate because it's really hard to really make a difference. There, other people said you can't do everything, you can only do one thing and do it well, just be mcdonald's just do water or just do literacy. But what we found was there was no one else in those areas helping those people.
So we came up with a comprehensive program that basically there were eight areas of focus and we came up with that program by sitting down with the local people. Um and, and creating what they felt was important. And when I came home to do the research, one of the books that I found was a book called People First. And there was in it a little saying that became my motto. It was another one of those pivotal moments and it said go to the people live with them, love them, learn from them, work with them, start with what they have build on what they know.
And in the end, the people will rejoice and say we have done it ourselves. So that's what we have always done. We do not go teach. We have local Mozambicans. We have a staff of 35 in Mozambique and we go out into the villages and they, the staff teaches the people in the villages to become the experts. And that's why we can leave. We're there for 2.5 years because it takes that long to do this cycle of self reliance until they're able to do it on their own. But we have a comprehensive program.
We teach health and hygiene, sanitation, uh literacy, housing or, or home improvement, income generation, psychosocial well being and community development. And they take classes in all of those eight areas. And one of the, one of the tricky things was we didn't want to give things because we didn't want to create this dependency. But if you're, if you're working with the extreme poor and you teach them how to plant a garden, how do they plan a garden? If they don't have seeds, a hole in a watering can?
And so, so we came up with this idea of incentives where if they've completed the class. They prepared the land, they prepared a fence of native materials. They can earn seeds, a ho and a watering can. And we do that with all of those date areas, they can learn a bag of cement to cover their stick and rock walls. So it doesn't wash away with the rain. They can earn a piece of tin, corrugated tin that goes on for a roof. So it doesn't collapse their house.
We use that same cement to build latrines, which is really just a hole in the ground um where they have a cover and then they build their own bricks to make a privacy, you know, a little place where they can go in and have a private place to go to the latrine. Um We do um a health week which is we partner with the government and they come in about every six months and they do immunizations and education. So they talk about HIV A I DS and testing counseling.
Um We register babies that have been born during that time. And so if I could throw in a, a tip for the giving machines, those are some of the things that you can uh purchase in the vending machine. Um For Light The World Campaign this year, you can, you can do a latrine. Um You can do immunizations and health education. Um We have the gardening kit, we have uh Home improvement, which the picture looks like home improvement doesn't explain it very well. It's, it's basically a bag of cement and hygiene.
So, hygiene kit is basically some soap and some water purification. Yeah. So, I'm curious how your family responded when you came home. I'm sure, sort of in a state of overwhelming. And what do I do next? Um, did they? I'm sure you didn't have the full thing, the full concept mapped out. But what was their reaction? Well, there was my two daughters, let's see, I had two daughters that weren't married. And so my youngest daughter, Annie, um, we were, we were originally, were going to go to Zimbabwe and then my husband said politically it was not safe and you're not going.
And so I'm like, ok, maybe I don't have to go after all and she came back and said there's a lot of places in Africa mom and so she really pushed us to go and Annie went every year, from the first year. She went every year until she was married. Then she took her husband with her. So, um, she'd spend the whole summer there. Uh, she was the youngest and she was able to do that. Um, my next oldest daughter got married pretty quickly after that. So she only made one trip.
Um, then my older kids didn't get to go. Um, until later, most of them have been now, a couple of them haven't yet, but I think that they didn't really understand and it's probably a good thing. I didn't really understand either how much, how much it would take out of our life. But they've been very supportive and my oldest daughter finally was able to go this last couple of years ago with, with her daughter, with my granddaughter, Eliza and, and my son was able to go back and so little by little they have, but they've been very involved on this end with.
We've done a lot of um projects, fundraising, um putting together those birthing kits that we had to complete for the government. We did all of those and ship those over and they've been really involved in lots of things. We do fundraisers and I call them and say, can you help come and put on this dinner, put on these things. But I think that it's kind of grown in our family to understand that it's just who we are and what we do very incredible. Where do you see this going next?
Where do you, what's the future look like for this program? I love that question. So originally, um I have to back up and tell you that after um we'd been doing the family preservation program, there's about 2000 people in a village and, you know, we, we can do as many as four or five villages at one time with the staff that we have and then when a village uh exits the program and is, is ready, then we can go on to other villages. And so we have a long waiting list of villages in, in Mozambique.
But um someone came to us and they said we'd like to study this. We'd like to do a five year controlled study on your program. It was someone who had come over and seen what we did and they were impressed. So, so these two professors at the University of Utah, Doctor Panos, uh husband and wife and they did this five year longitudinal study with two controlled villages and two care for life villages to see if what we really if, if what we were doing was working. And when they came back after this five year study, we were blown away with what we learned.
We lower infant mortality by 57% we lower maternal mortality by 78%. So we said we wanted to go into the orphan prevention business and we did and we did it. And so that comes to your question, how do we share this with the world? You know, and originally we thought, well, if we can do five villages at a time, we can get to the really poor villages in Mozambique with this much money and this much time. And then we thought we're back to the, how can you help one orphanage again?
Nope, we got to do this differently. And so what we've decided to do now is there are so many great organizations out there. Local organizations in countries who are run by the local people who are trying to help change their world that they live in. So we decided rather than care for life, going to another country, we started in Sudan and we, we were developing the family preservation program there. We had a few other countries targeted. But then we decided a much more effective use of this would be for us to train other nonprofits or other NGO S non government organizations in, in these extreme poverty countries.
And so that's what we're doing. We, and we've set it up where we, we did training in Sudan by just mostly zoom. We did zoom. We had, they had zoom, we had, we hired five people over there to get it started. We're uh exploring the Democratic Republic of the Congo right now where we uh ha have everything translated into French and we have the manuals and our goal is to share this with the world as quickly as we can. We've had other people look at it and say no one's doing what you're doing, no one's getting those kind of results.
And so our goal is to share this with the world anywhere that extreme poverty exists, to share the program that's tried and true and can help people and, and it's really very cost effective. There's not a lot of cost. We don't do brick and mortar buildings, we don't ship containers, you know, we, we hire local people, it helps the local economy. Um And so, yeah, we're just anxious to share it with the world. That's awesome. However, we can, this is probably a question for you, Sarah, but you mentioned there giving program that, that's available and it's the holiday season.
Tell me a little bit about that. Would you? I think the machines are you, you probably would be most appropriate to share since you're a benefiting nonprofit. But um the Giving Machines are an opportunity for the community to give to both local and worldwide nonprofits um through the season of giving effort. And so, um I don't know the exact dates of the run, but I know um Fran and Steve Lauder initiate that effort here in our community and it's a great opportunity to go uh select your uh cause that most aligns with, with your mission and your own personal life and give back to the community. Clearly.
This sounds like a great one right here. So this would be amazing. All of all of the organizations that are in the giving machines are just so good. We've had an opportunity to rub shoulders with the, with the other organizations and they're all good. Most of them are local. Um But it is, there's so, and it's been so fun to work the machines, to go down there and to meet families that have come down and um you know, families. So the kids have done chores and saved up their money to come down and choose something from the giving machine to give, to give away to machines.
I don't think, I know they're in downtown Gilbert. Uh, if you go to the water tower there's one at the base of the water tower and then across the street at the Hall theater, they were gracious enough to let us put a machine there and, and they have, uh, machines in other places in Arizona as well. And actually throughout, throughout the country and Gilbert, their machines alone each year have raised over a million dollars. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing program. Um I just want to say that I'm so grateful that we had the opportunity to talk to you today and thank you to your daughter, Amy, your beautiful daughter, Amy for making this connection.
She's a light in this community as well as are so many of your Children. And um I, I feel like we could spend another hour with you and all the beautiful work that you've done and thank you so much for spending time with us today. Well, I appreciate it so much and um we appreciate all that you do for Gilbert. Um It's Amy has been able to kind of get in and see the inner workings of it a little bit and it's just been really inspiring to know how many hours are given all the time to help Gilbert be the wonderful community that it is.
And if I could just ask if anyone is interested in learning more about Care For Life. Um We have a wonderful website, uh Care For life. org and people can go there and they can also learn about the giving machine and, and how that works and how they can. It brings a lot of joy into the families instead of kids just asking what they can get for Christmas, they can, they can find out something they can give and, and then they can uh follow that donation and find out where it went and how it helped people.
So certainly a tradition in our family to go down and have the kids make their selections. So it's really awesome. That's great. Great, Cindy. Thank you for being here and thank you for listening to this episode. I'm sure you enjoyed it just as much as I did and you learned a lot today about your path and the journeys you've been on and the organizations that you've helped create. So this is fantastic. So, thank you, if you want to get more of these episodes into your inbox Joiner tribe, so you can get them right in there when we launch them.
Thank you for listening. See you soon. Guiding growth, conversations with community leaders. Ben, let me ask you a question. How do you see other community members being involved in this podcast? This is going to be a great opportunity for so many people in the community to have a chance to be heard if they want to tell their story or if they just want to be part of this journey with us and help sponsor in a way that helps bring more people to the table with us. So I think there's many opportunities at hand whether you want to again be on the show, reach out to us, let us know what your story is and how you think you could be part of it.
We'd love to hear from you. Reach out, let us know and we'll see if we can make that connection.
