After going 19 months without its main fundraiser due to COVID-19, Operation Honor Guard is once again holding its “Day of Giving” on Thursday at various locations throughout central Illinois, including here in Danville.
Rich Darby founded the organization in 2013 as a way to support local veterans who present our nation’s colors at fellow veterans’ memorial services. Operation Honor Guard provides financial support to military service organizations such as the American Legion and VFW, while also recruiting new members as some of the guard are aging. Darby explains that military honors aren’t actually guaranteed in all cases.
“I will get emails seven days a week from family members saying ‘My father, my husband, our son…passed away, they’re a veteran, how do we get the honor guard at their funeral,” he says. “I facilitate getting them to their funeral director and making sure that they get the final military rights that their veteran deserves.”
Darby says that donations can also be made online through Operation Honor Guard’s website. He adds that the in-person donation sites will look a bit different this year.
“We have donor tubes this year,” he explains. “Usually we have buckets, but we actually have a donor tube which is a cardboard tube, eight inches in diameter and three feet long. So the veteran is going to hold the tube to your window and we’ll social distance, and so you can drop your money in that tube.”
Local residents can stop by Hall of Fame Plaques and Signs on North Vermilion Street in Danville and at Sunset Funeral Home in Westville between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. to donate. Members of the Neuhoff Media staff will be at the Danville site between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Thursday also marks the return of the Police Memorial Ceremony at Sunset Memorial Park. It will begin at 10 a.m. at the Law Enforcement Memorial section of the cemetery.
{Some members of the Westville American Legion Post Honor Guard helping with Thursday’s collections.}