2023 Christmas Wish List

Meeting our end of the year fundraising goal will allow us to continue to honor, serve and remember America’s heroes, through our Museum, the events we host, the complimentary Veterans lunches, veteran support, and more.

As in the past, 2023 brought many challenges to our small non-profit that is run solely by volunteers. We persevered and stayed the course in the following ways:

- Hosting 2 Veterans lunches serving over 200. Our Annual THANKSgiving Lunch is one of our favorites to host! It includes our partnership with The Radio People and the Steve & Marjorie Harvey Foundation, who for the 7th year provide turkeys or gift cards for turkeys, that we are able to distribute to local Veterans attending the lunch.

- Splitting the proceeds of our Mike Kavanaugh Memorial Clay Shoot with 7 Days for the Troops - which serves disabled Veterans

- Co-hosting with the Chennault Aviation & Military Museum - the Red, White & Blue Air Show: Saluting America’s Heroes in which over 17,000 in attendance

- hosting over 30 field trips/group tours and over 5,000 tourists from the U.S, Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, and more

-hosting the USS Orion Submarine Tender Group Reunion

-hosting along with NATA- the largest Warbird Formation Clinic to date, with over 40 Warbirds, and over 70 pilots from 20 different states including Hawaii

- by hosting the Educational CAF RISE ABOVE Travelling Exhibit featuring the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen & WASPs of WWII, and how they overcame obstacles to serve their country. The Exhibit was FREE to the community and all who wanted to attend during the 5 day period. Over 1100 came to view the Exhibit.

-Added new memorabilia and exhibits to the Museum, and created new ways for visitors to relate to the exhibits, through trading cards telling stories in the first person, featuring the Heroes, the aircraft and several significant items throughout the Museum.

- We have been selected a Top Non-Profit thru Great Non-Profit Reviews for the 8th year in a row! Keeping our Admin costs extremely low and our use of funds for Programs extremely high.
https://greatnonprofits.org/org/southern-heritage-air-foundation

Raising our goal of $10,000 will allow us to grow and expand our programs which, educate, preserve, assist and honor America’s heroes.

We hope that if you don’t find an item here to bid on, that you consider a tax deductible donation.

Thank you for your support and come visit us soon!

Seeing a need for energetic, nonprofit work in this area,in 2004, the late MS. Governor Kirk Fordice and his son Dan, formed our organization, to preserve the stories of local and regional WWII Veterans and to preserve aviation history by keep Vintage and WWII aircraft flying and educating all who walk through our doors! We've consistently grown since then, all thanks to the helping hands of this amazing community!