Washington, DC, May 16, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Today, the Bob Woodruff Foundation (BWF) announced that it will host a live stream partnership update featuring Bob Woodruff, Co-Founder of BWF and His Excellency Sheikh Meshal bin Hamad Al-Thani, Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the US. The livestream will be hosted on the Bob Woodruff Foundation Facebook page at 5:15 PM EDT on Thursday, May 16, 2019.
The Bob Woodruff Foundation and the State of Qatar established a $6 million, two-year partnership to support veterans and their families who have been impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Funding was provided by the State of Qatar through its Qatar Harvey Fund, a $30 million fund established in 2017 for the long-term recovery of southeast Texas communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey. The Bob Woodruff Foundation is making grants to those best-in-class veteran nonprofits that can provide direct, positive impact to veterans in the 41 storm-impacted counties in southeast Texas. The livestream will announce the first two grantees funded through the partnership – The St. Bernard Project and Lone Star Legal Aid – and include representatives from both organizations.
“Our partners in the State of Qatar host over 10,000 U.S. service men and women on a daily basis at Al Udeid Air Base and they continue to extend their generosity to the US. We are leading together to help address the ongoing needs of veterans in the storm-impacted areas of Texas through a series of grants, and this week we are proud to announce the first of those programs,” said Anne Marie Dougherty, Chief Executive Officer of the Bob Woodruff Foundation.
“Houston and southeast Texas has shown extraordinary resilience in their response to Hurricane Harvey’s devastation,” said Sheikh Meshal bin Hamad Al-Thani, Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the U.S. “But true recovery is a challenging and complicated process, especially for veterans whose lives were upended in the storm. The Qatar Harvey Fund was created to reach families and communities that might otherwise slip through the cracks on the long road back to normalcy and we are are honored to partner with the Bob Woodruff Foundation in supporting these valuable projects.”
Lone Star Legal Aid (LSLA) and The St. Bernard Project (SBP) are two of the many organizations that are working in and around Houston to ensure that veterans have the support they need to rebuild, recover, and thrive.
Lower-income veterans face a tough road in the recovery process from Hurricane Harvey. They’ve lost homes, cars, food supplies, their sense of community, and a lifetime’s worth of personal belongings. In many cases, they have also lost their employment because of storm damage suffered by small businesses. These veterans have few resources to address their losses. Lone Star Legal Aid covers twenty-five of the forty-one federally declared Harvey disaster counties in Texas. Since the storm, they have been supporting veterans with legal issues to include those related to rebuilding such as filing insurance and FEMA appeals, title clearing issues, evictions, and fallout from repair scams; as well as persisting or exacerbated issues impacting family security such as mounting debt, unemployment claims, title loan problems, home foreclosures, access to healthcare and education, and family law concerns. This grant will expand LSLA’s outreach to veterans in underserved communities, particularly along the rural gulf coast, identify veteran clients who require legal support, and serve 250 clients with a total of 400 legal issues.
SBP is a nationally-recognized disaster resilience and recovery organization that has been working in storm-impacted communities since Katrina. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey caused widespread wind damage and historic flooding throughout the Texas Gulf Coast region, damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and caused an estimated $75 billion in losses. The recovery in rural communities is especially challenging, given limited recovery resources. Veterans often fail to self-advocate and thus experience an even larger disadvantage than their rural neighbors. This grant will ensure 10 veterans living in rural communities affected by Harvey and requiring home repair/rebuild services have access to resources and support.
Please join the Bob Woodruff Foundation and Ambassador Al-Thani at 5:15 PM on May 16 to learn more about this partnership and the upcoming initiatives in Texas.
Additional Bob Woodruff Foundation grants made possible by the Qatar Harvey Fund are expected to be announced in late 2019, as well as into 2020. To learn more about qualifying for a Bob Woodruff Foundation grant, please visit https://bobwoodrufffoundation.org/grants/.
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ABOUT THE BOB WOODRUFF FOUNDATION
The Bob Woodruff Foundation (BWF) was founded in 2006 after reporter Bob Woodruff was hit by a roadside bomb while covering the war in Iraq. Since then, the Bob Woodruff Foundation has led an enduring call to action for people to stand up for heroes and meet the emerging and long-term needs of today’s veterans. To date, BWF has invested more than $65 million to find, fund and shape programs that have empowered impacted veterans and service members, and their families, across the nation. For more information, please visit https://bobwoodrufffoundation.org or follow us on Twitter at @Stand4Heroes.
ABOUT THE QATAR HARVEY FUND AND THE STATE OF QATAR
Following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, the State of Qatar announced a gift of $30 million for the long-term recovery of the storms victims in Texas. The Qatar Harvey Fund was created to administer the gift. Qatar is an independent state in the southern Arabian Gulf. It has a population of approximately 2.7 million people, the majority of whom live in and around Doha, the capital. Diplomatic relations with the United States were established in 1972; in the same year, Qatar’s first diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C. opened. The relationship between the two countries has always been friendly, highly productive, and reciprocal. Qatar is home to many Americans, and the United States is both Qatar’s largest foreign investor and its largest source of imports. Qatar-U.S. relations are growing continuously in multiple areas: economic, political, military, educational, and cultural. Qatar is a close ally of the United States and a strong advocate of building a peaceful, prosperous, and stable Middle East. Qatar has provided significant humanitarian and development assistance to countries around the world, including the United States.