Open House = Open Hearts
(To learn more about the businesses that supported the open house at Peace Mountain Ranch, please click on the hyperlinks in the story below.)
As many of you know, Peace Mountain Ranch held its first Open House on June 11, 2023. We planned for weeks to make this a success. We mailed invitations to over 130 Veterans in the county. We mailed invitations to over 73 churches in the county. We invited all of the providers in the county including mental health, physical health, and ministries that provide support in the county. We put posters up around town. We took an ad out in The Tomahawk, the paper for Mountain City. We had the local radio station WMTC “The Mountain” do public service spots. We advertised on Facebook. We sent out a press release to the area TV and newspaper outlets. We did everything we could think of to get the word out about Peace Mountain Ranch and our open house.
We made gift bags to give away. We had t-shirts and hats with our logo made by Click Creative ; we purchased bags of coffee from Know Better Coffee; we got specially designed mugs from Nautilus Pottery; we got some certificates for a day at a tactical training range from Range 51; we made some coasters with our logo on them; we ordered Rtic travel mugs with our logo; we had all sorts of gifts to give to those who gave a donation during the open house. We had Fat Daddy’s Chilli (with two “L’s”) Dogs there to provide refreshments to hungry visitors; we had volunteers bake cookies; we had lemonade and tea. We had our good friends Dan Parsons and Jim Whitesell from the Mountain City VFW Post 6908provide a couple of UTVs to help move people around the ranch. Big Bad Wolf Motorsports in Mountain City loaned us a third UTV. We had volunteers from the Mountain City VFW Post 6908 and the Mountain City American Legion Post 61 along with their auxiliaries out to help tell the story of Peace Mountain Ranch. We were ready for a great crowd!
The open house started at 1300 (1:00 pm) and we had a great initial crowd; but it rained a little bit and looked to threaten more, so we didn’t get as many later arrivals as we might have if it had been a nicer afternoon. Still we had a bunch of people visit who had never been to the Ranch before. We had several people make donations during the open house and a couple of churches are considering supporting us on a regular basis.
The coolest thing was that the press release (an afterthought really) actually worked! WHJL Channel 11 ABC out of Bristol, Virginia sent a reporter name Jayonna Scurry out to cover our open house. She had a great personality, and was a one-woman wonder, handling the reporting, the camera, and the editing. Our story played on the 2300 (11:00 pm) news (click the hyperlink to see the story). From that one showing, we received an invitation to the Tri-Cities Military Affairs Council (TC-MAC) a group that supports the military and Veterans in Johnson City, Kingsport, Bristol, Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. We had a few Veterans contact us to see how we might be able to help them. We also had a story about the open house in the Tomahawk. The Tomahawk is a weekly paper and they worked with us to make sure our story was in the next edition after the open house. All this great exposure coming from this one event!
Our Open House Volunteers: Nancy and Gary Lewis, Jim and Diane Boggess, Joanne and Jim Whitesell, Frank Bass, Dane and Kaye Parsons, Drue Louiselle, Steve Owens, Jesse Compton, Jason and Mandy Ingram, Richard Eller, Glenn Ransom, Harvey and Kim Macklin. (Not pictured: John Job and Teresa Owens)
We also received inquiries from 17 people at the open house about becoming volunteers at the Ranch! This will bring our total number of volunteers to over 40 people. So many that we plan to hold a Volunteer Orientation event in July to get to know our new friends and to see how they will best fit. Because of the open house we were invited to have a booth at the grand opening of their new location for Helping Others, an outreach to the underserved in Mountain City and Johnson County, Tennessee where we signed up another volunteer and told our story to those at the grand opening.
One of Dr. Charles Stanley’s life principles was “obey God and leave all the consequences to Him.” That is one of the principles that we strive to follow here at Peace Mountain Ranch. God put the open house on our hearts and we struck out to do our very best. We preened and pruned, painted and cleaned, ordered supplies and gathered volunteers; we sent out mailings and hung posters. We did everything we could think of to make this open house a success. Was it a success? Well, what defines success? The number of visitors? The amount of new donations? No, those would be worldly measures of a spiritual event. Success is defined by the lives touched, the number of Veterans helped, the number of people willing to help, whether it was by giving, or volunteering, or referring someone to us. These are the measures of success. And the open house was not only a success, it continues to be a success.
For example, Doe Valley Farm, a local cut and choose Christmas tree farm heard about the open house, and while they couldn’t come on the day of the open house, they came to visit the next week. Run by a Veteran, Doe Valley Farm is looking for ways to work with us to reach Veterans. Another example, a Veteran who had recently moved to Mountain City reached out to us, after he saw an ad for the open house, to see if we could help him find housing. We connected him to the owner of a rental property that we knew was available and got in touch with the VFW and the American Legion to see he got the help he needed to move out of the hotel and into a house. We have had veterans call about coming to Peace Mountain Ranch that didn’t know about us until we decided to have the open house. We have a couple of churches looking to partner with us to help Veterans. These are the kinds of things that qualify continued success.
We obeyed, and God took care of the consequences. What is God leading YOU to do? Open your heart and find out!
