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Brownies, presents, and candy ... Oh MY!  Sounds like the annual Walter Reed Holiday Party was a hit. 

Blue Star Families needs your help!  Today, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and craigconnects, announced a month long campaign to highlight and support nonprofits helping military families and veterans.  Blue Star Families and three other organizations will receive more than $100,000 in craigconnects grants to support our work for military families, but we need you!

Senior military officials, leaders in government and business, and members of the entertainment community joined military family representatives on Thursday for the launch of a new suicide prevention PSA campaign aimed at military families and veterans.

Military women and men who come back from a deployment injured often feel they are forgotten as they struggle to rebuild their lives. And maybe there is some merit to those feelings giving only one-percent of our population has served in the United States Armed Forces since post- 9/11; the impact of two wars is felt by relatively few.

Today, Oscar®, Emmy®, and Grammy® Award-winning performer Cher is among the many artists who have joined The Creative Coalition and Blue Star Families to create a PSA campaign to help raise awareness and combat suicides among our military service members and their families.

On Tuesday, January 18th in Washington, DC, the Army-Navy Club hosted a Suicide Forum with Gen. Peter Chiarelli to discuss the most recent suicide rates for the Army. The forum audience members were privy to the numbers several hours before Chiarelli’s presentation at the Pentagon, and the key dynamic in the conversation was this: while the overall number of active duty Army suicides decreased slightly in 2010,* the National Guard and Reserve suicides significantly increased, almost doubling from 80 deaths in 2009 to 145 deaths in 2010.

On Veterans Day, we fly our flags and we attend rallies, concerts and parades to honor our military veterans. All are wonderful expressions of support and appreciation. But for some of our citizens, the war's impact goes far beyond what can be provided by these gestures.

This week, I was privileged to travel to Los Angeles to be a guest of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. I wouldn’t realize the gravity of this opportunity until later when I would be onstage with three of the women I love the most. A diva could get spoiled: Charles and I were picked up at the airport in a limo and taken to the Sheraton Hotel in Universal City.

On Thursday, October 28,2010, at 3pm EST, Blue Star Families Development Director, Pamela Stokes Eggleston, will be appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres Show with First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden.  Join us for a live blog of the event!

I've watched all of the "It Gets Better" videos that have crossed my desktop since the campaign began. In these affecting testimonials prompted by the increase in suicides of young gay men, celebrities and public figures speak out to reassure those bullied about their sexuality that the pressures do eventually ease.