Standup and Play Challenge 

June 10, 2010

Vets-Help is pleased to announce a change to our recent initiative “The Stand Up and Play Challenge”. We are working with new partners and have expanded our whole adaptive sports programs. The scope is now encompassing many other sports, both extreme and tame, and we are holding meetings this month to confirm new venues that will be exclusive to Vets-Help and their partners. We are initiating the program here in the USA in 2010, beginning in New York and Florida and expanding throughout the United States, where traumatically injured veterans and other disabled people are encouraged to learn to work through their disability to participate in sports supervised by specially trained teachers.

We are working in several areas, the first including our golf program with special wheelchairs especially designed to allow certain disabled people to literally stand up. There are many health benefits besides the tremendous emotional lift of being outside and developing a new hobby. They include easing circulation problems and sores, strengthening the muscles otherwise not being used, deterring limb atrophy, and resisting bone related issues due to non-use. The wheelchair can also be used for work-related activities, so the user is not confined to just one level, but can stand and work as well.

Another program we are supporting is the disabled Tri-Forces Triathlon, where our disabled veteran friends will be participating in a special event for them in June in the Washington DC area.

The Challenge is national in scope and is about to get tremendous visibility through the extensive networking we have cultivated. The Golf Channel and the Golf print media groups  visited us in the 2010 PGA Merchandising Expo being held in Orlando in January. NASCAR is interested in our work with the wheelchairs and we are coordinating plans for their active support this year on the circuit. We are involved with another not for profit in Florida that has been given numerous offers to build communities and jobs, and are already training instructors with the specialized care necessary to teach our injured brothers and sisters. We are joining with this group to handle the golf activities while we handle numerous other financial, commercial, legal and strategic aspects of the partnership, providing wheelchairs, and creating industries to support our veterans and disabled friends with a livelihood and the ability to own their own businesses and their own affordable, well-built green homes.

Additionally, the wheelchairs are only the first product being introduced in the Challenge. We are designing other equipment that our own communities will manufacture, sell and service, in companies that the communities will own. We have been approached by IBM and Georgia Tech to participate with us in designing smart chairs that can also help control smart houses for our friends who use the chairs, and also access essential information during their normal traveling.

Finally-the chair can used by children. One young man about 7 years old beamed when he stood up and proudly showed off his vertical stance to his mother – telling her in a very excited voice “Look, Mom, I can stand!”. What parent wouldn't want that for their child?

This first year in particular we expect to be giving away the chairs outright as we develop the cash flow necessary to buy them, or by giving golf courses the right to use them. Our goal is to build our own equipment to support our own communities, so the Challenge can buy and donate as many chairs as they can in order to provide the demand necessary to support our communities assembling, manufacturing, selling and servicing them. Ultimately they will be submitted for approval in various capacities to qualify for insurance plans, government reimbursement, etc.

Thank you for your interest and your support. Businesses who would like to participate with us will be pleased to learn how we can get tremendous visibility for them and extraordinary value far exceeding any sponsorship costs. This is documented in independent studies available for you to read.

Look for announcements with new partnerships that are in the works.