CARES Update--Wednesday and Yesterday were very hard days

Dear Friends,

On Wednesday, we got the final word that the server and back-up hard drive were so damaged by fire that the best data recovery company in country that we had hired could not get anything off of them. Not only did we lose our database of members and physicians, but we lost 5 years of work product and all of our financial data (thank goodness our accountant called this week got us an extension from the IRS).Now we have to try to recreate the lost work and data. This is where you all come in: IF YOU HAVE NOT RE-JOINED ON OUR WEBSITE, PLEASE DO SO! ALSO, ASK YOUR PEDS ENDOS AND ADULT ENDOS, UROLOGISTS, ETC. TO RE-JOIN TOO. If you had family members that received our newsletters (grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends ,etc) ask them to sign up again too.

Since we just did 2 major mailings in the last 3 months, our printer still has the mailing addresses for all of our members and donors, so we can do a snail mailing to our everyone to let them know about the fire and ask everyone to re-join.

Yesterday was a very hard day too. We had to clean out what was left of the office. Since the building has now been condemned by the fire dept. it is fairly dangerous to go into. We hired a professional disaster clean up company to try to retrieve what ever we could. Gratefully, file cabinets actually protect papers pretty well, so many of our papers in our file cabinets were relatively intact--even those that were completely engulfed in fire. While in this age of computers, we do not have everything on paper also, we do have a lot and can begin to try to re-eneter the data into our new server.

I also just found out I need to have some major surgery. I think it is stress related. It has been a hard week.

More later--got to go.

Hugs,

Kelly

CARES Offices Burn to the Ground

My dear friends,

On Friday morning, a fire destroyed the CARES Foundation offices, taking with it everything we had along with our server that contained our database, files and materials. We are just heartbroken. We lost everything. They think the fire was caused by faulty electrical in the building. New photos of the inside of the building will up on the web site soon.

As an aside--our Winter Newsletter is up on the web site. At least we got it up before the fire. I was going to send an email notice to everyone this weekend to let you know, before all of this happened.

Yesterday, Meryl, Adam (my husband) and I went to see the damage. It was scary—parts of the floor and walls were missing, but the staircase was intact. The damage to the building was massive. We carefully went up to our offices to survey everything.

In the debris, we saw a glint of silver aluminum under a piece of sheetrock. It was the back up hard drive and it was –marginally—intact. It clearly had been burned, was wet, but the aluminum case may have protected the hard drive. So, perhaps some of the data can be saved. We have taken the computers & hard drive to supposedly one of the best data recovery companies in the country—they recovered 99% of the data from the Space Shuttle Columbia, but are warned that the costs can be astronomical—maybe more than $25,000. So, we will see…. Meryl, of course, is great at negotiating prices.

Sadly, we were very underinsured—as most nonprofits are, and of course we never anticipated a loss of this magnitude. We only had $13,000 in renter's insurance. We cannot even estimate the costs of rebuilding, since years of work and materials may be lost on the computers. Of course, we lost all of our materials, our article database, our referral info, etc. It will take so many, many hours to recreate all of this. We also have a big grant to the NIH for CAH research we are supposed to fund, so we can't afford to divert these funds.

If you have any suggestions, or any resources we would really appreciate your help. If you know of any really rich angels, we sure could use one right now. Thanks so much for anything you can do.

Also, please immediately go to the web site and re-register and get anyone you know that is affected by CAH or a donor or family member to do the same. This is the information we really need.

Also, please bear with us if we are not prompt in our replies to you. Since our infrastructure is gone and we have so much work to do to get re-settled, our support program will not be what we want it to be for a while.

Thank you all for your good wishes, donations, supportive calls and emails. We really do feel your love and prayers and know that God will come through for CARES and the rest of the CAH community. When God closes a door, he opens a window. We will make it through.

With Love,

Kelly

http://www.caresfoundation.org
Email: kelly@caresfoundation.org
CARES Foundation, Inc.189 Main St. Millburn, NJ 07041(post office is holding our mail for us, so if you are able to help with a donation, we will get it). Our secure web site also takes credit cards.
973-912-3895 and toll free- 1-866-227-3737 phone numbers being re-routed to my home phone (don't leave a message with my kids/husband--I may not get it. Please call back and leave it on the machine).