Community Foundation of Palm Beach
and Martin Counties: $20,000 raised
for Hurricane Ike relief

The Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties, Memorial Presbyterian Church and private donors raised more than $20,000 for the Eagles Wings Foundation, a West Palm Beach, not-for-profit, disaster-relief organization, to provide hurricane relief in Texas.

Local gardener Scott Lewis is the founder and president of the Eagles Wings Foundation. The volunteer team he led helped survivors in the weeks immediately following Hurricane Ike, which devastated the Texas coast. Originally tasked to the Galveston area, Lewis was redirected by state officials to eastern Texas, where storm surge flooded a region of 75,000 residents.

Lewis, who has extensive volunteer emergency-management experience, was appointed as the Pathfinder Pathfinder Commander by the local Emergency Operations Center. Using a successful model he employed in Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina, Lewis convinced a local school superintendent to turn over his largest and newest high school facility for use as a base for short term response missions.

The teams' focus was searching out and resolving the needs of Hurricane Ike survivors via door-to-door interviews, using grid search patterns that were updated daily. The Eagles Wings Foundation, founded after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, relies upon South Florida volunteers, many of whom are retirees with a variety of skills. To volunteer or donate, visit www.theeagleswingsfoundation.org

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