Donate to Cover Stories Behind the Stars Costs

Stories Behind the Stars is seeking donations to cover $6,000 of hard costs incurred during 2022 and the first half of 2023.

Our organization has to pay fees to use WIX for our website, Network For Good for our CRM, Podia and Camtasia for training material, and NordVPN to grant our volunteers free access to Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, and Premium Fold3.com. These expenses make it possible for us to communicate, train, and support the research of our volunteer writers.

 

Our mission is to find volunteers to write the stories of all of the 421,000+ US World War II fallen in one common database. You can find the completed 24,000 stories here. These stories are being written by hundreds of volunteers from all 50 states and many other countries.

 

An accompanying smartphone app allows people to read these stories at any memorial or gravesite. This will forever change the experience of visiting these hallowed sites. See how this works here.

 

There is no better way to honor those who paid the ultimate price for the freedoms we enjoy than support the mission to tell their stories - all 421,000+ of them.

 

Stories Behind the Stars is a nonprofit initiative, not a stand-alone 501c3. We chose this format because our organization goes away after our mission is over - hopefully by September 2, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. With enough volunteers, we should be able to complete all 421,000 stories by then.

 

Normally, tax-deductible donations have been made through our 501c3 fiscal sponsor Better Cause, which is run by a friend from my banking days. However, the IRS has misfiled some paperwork and is slow to get it corrected. This has prevented us from collecting any donations through our Network For Good channel during much of 2022.

This GoFundMe campaign is an alternate effort to allow people to help us cover expenses we have already paid out from personal funds. (I've been covering these costs by using money I've earned from being a part-time Lyft and Uber driver.)

I am hopeful that we will be able to resolve the IRS misfiling soon, so we can return to the donation channel we used in 2020 and 2021.

Thanks so much for helping as you can.

Don Milne

Founder and Director

Stories Behind the Stars