ShelterBox USA has just honored the Southern Rensselaer County Rotary Club as a Silver Level Hero Club.

The award, which follows several other ShelterBox honors in the past few years, is in recognition of  our club’s financial support of the emergency relief organization, this time for its contribution of more than $3,000 in the 2015-16 Rotary Year.

Our club’s current budget includes another $3,000 contribution to the work of ShelterBox (we already have raised $2,600 toward that goal), and the club Board of Directors has approved a three-year pledge of $3,000 per year, which would maintain the Silver Hero Club status. The ShelterBox Hero program provides for three-year pledges at the $1,000 (bronze), $3,000 (silver), and $5,000 (gold) levels per year.

In addition to ongoing relief efforts in Haiti, Ecuador, Italy and elsewhere to battle the effects of natural disasters, ShelterBox also has been flooding the Mosul, Iraq, region with ShelterBoxes to help people fleeing from the fierce fighting in and around that city as government and allied forces fight to oust ISIS terrorists there. In the past two weeks, about 2,000 ShelterBoxes — at an expenditure of $2 million — have been sent there and are being out to use.