September 24, 2018
Dear LCCN Clients, Supporters, and Partners,
I want to thank our users and St John community who have donated since my last email detailing LCCN's precarious financial position. The team has been inspired by the stories of how important our work continues to be for families and businesses in the long term recovery process. LCCN now finds itself on a more stable financial footing and I'm relieved to announce that for the rest of Hurricane Season, we’ll be able to step back from the drastic steps I detailed last month. While we're by no means out of the woods and are making efforts to streamline our operations, we are now in a better position to continue supporting our 500+ clients with high quality service and the island as a whole with disaster-resilient connectivity.
I'm especially thankful for our monthly donors, who have now grown to 110 strong. Not to mention our friends at St. John Brewers, North Shore Deli, St. John Scoops, St. John Community Foundation, Love City Strong, Blue Line Yacht Charters and all those who attended and contributed at the Still Standing event at Mongoose Junction. The fundraiser was a smashing success that raised over $10,000 for LCCN. Additionally, I’d like to specifically recognize Paradise Lumber, Sol Villas, Calichi On St. John and Gifft Hill School for their very generous contributions. Recently we were able to make an overdue upgrade at our Lovango site that immediately solved persistent outages that were experienced by all users on the north leg of the network from Lovango to Hansen Bay. This upgrade was made possible because of the increased support we received in the last few weeks.
The strong showing from the community has even gained the attention of other outside donors. The Secunda Family Foundation has helped us officially secure technical consulting from one of the US's preeminent network engineers. In fact, you may have already noticed a faster and more stable connection thanks to a short phone consultation yielding a few powerful tips for improvement. We have also secured the services of a professional grant writer to help us earn funds from the US Dept of Commerce that will enable us to purchase back-up equipment and hopefully a used pick-up truck so our employees will not have to use their personal vehicles to maintain the network. A section of this grant application asks specifically for details about strength of community support and funds to be secured outside of the grant awards.
While LCCN is in a much better place than just a few weeks ago, we still need your help to keep the momentum going! If you haven’t joined our monthly giving program please join today. Even small monthly gifts go a long way toward keeping our overhead costs low and giving us the support needed to deliver on our mission well into the future.
Thank you for taking the time to keep updated on our progress. The entire LCCN team is working tirelessly to be a model for providing disaster resilient communications that support response and recovery.
Sincerely,
Devin J. Murphy
Executive Director
