Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Dream Machine

Our Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) program had some exciting news to share yesterday and we were able to announce it in the heart of New York city in Times Square. PepsiCo International announced a wonderful new national partnership that will provide us with help for our very special veteran’s initiative. Our EBV Program was selected over dozens of other groups, and will get not only significant funding, but tremendous national publicity as well. In an effort to increase recycling, Pepsi has decided to offer an added incentive to return bottles and cans: they are setting up thousands of “dream machines,” and for every recyclable deposited in one of these, PepsiCo will make a financial contribution to the EBV program to ‘help a veteran live the American Dream of becoming an entrepreneur.’ It’s an awesome way for Americans to protect the environment and give back to the disabled servicemen and women who served them so selflessly and so honorably. This is an exclusive and three year relationship, where the EBV program is the sole financial beneficiary of PepsiCo’s recycling campaign.

The EBV program, founded by our own Dr. Mike Haynie is based on one simple idea: helping disabled veterans with dreams of entrepreneurship to start their own businesses. Since its inception in 2007, we have graduated over 225 veterans! This is such an amazing program…truly life-changing for the participants. One of my hardest (and saddest) tasks though has been to turn away eager applicants because our program has been full. With this new partnership with Pepsi we’ll be able to open the program to even more deserving vets. For more information on this neat program, take a look at the Pepsi Dream Machine Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/dreammachine#!/dreammachine?v=wall

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