A national nonprofit’s fundraising campaign is smoking out the Williston Park Fire Department’s annual fund drive, the fire chief said.
Residents received a mailed fundraising pitch from the Bulls Gap, Tennessee-based Volunteer Firefighter Alliance about a week after Williston Park firefighters sent their annual ask to every home in the village, Chief Richard Sais said.
Alan Bohms, the alliance’s executive director, said the timing was just an unfortunate coincidence. But Sais is concerned that residents will give to the national group without realizing the money won’t help their local firefighters, he said.
“They’re going to ply on people’s sentimentality to give and it’s not going to help us,” Sais said.
The Williston Park department mailed a flier seeking donations to its annual fund drive on Aug. 1, Sais said. A resident brought the Volunteer Firefighter Alliance’s mailer to his attention on Aug. 8, he said.
The mailer asks the recipient to sign and return a “thank you card” that will go to a firefighter somewhere in New York. It also asks for donations to the alliance’s “national effort to retain our current volunteer firefighters, recruit new volunteers, and help our volunteer fire departments raise funds for new firefighting equipment.”
Sais said the mailers have been spotted across Nassau County.
The Volunteer Firefighters Alliance started serving northeast Tennessee firefighters in 2014 and took its programs national in March, Bohms said. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit is sending the mailers once a month for three months to help that growth, he said.
The Williston Park firefighters’ flier touts the department’s response to 830 fire and rescue calls last year. “Your contribution keeps the Williston Park Fire Department going!” it reads.
The fund drive, running from August to October, is an important supplement to the department’s $402,000 budget, Sais said. Any group cannibalizing donations for firefighters would be “detrimental to our department and the fund drive,” he said.
Fire departments in Maryland and Connecticut have flagged the alliance’s mailers as a scam.
But Bohms said the group’s first-responder crisis hotline has fielded nearly 900 calls from across New York since March. It also recently sent free fire prevention materials to the Ridge Fire Department in Suffolk County, he said.
“One thing that I don’t want to do is take away from a local fire department … That would defeat the purpose of what we’re trying to do here,” Bohms, a volunteer firefighter in Mohawk, Tenn., said.
The Topeka, Kan., return address on the alliance’s mailer puzzled Sais.
But Bohms said that’s the address of a facility that processes mailed donations and returns them to the group.
The alliance sent information about its programs — which include a scholarship fund and recruitment resources — to more than 17,000 fire departments nationwide, Bohms said, but the fundraising mailer may have gotten to Williston Park before that package.
Bohms thinks local fire departments will be less suspicious of his group once they learn more about it, he said.
Sais, though, said Williston Park residents are best off giving their money directly to their fire department.
Countywide firefighting leaders are considering a broader campaign to raise awareness about the alliance’s mailers.
