O.C. housewife turns sleepless nights into effort to help military spouses The accident resulted in amnesia, which landed Briggeman in therapy for two years and caused her to miss out on a bachelor's degree just six units shy of graduation. Instead, she found herself fighting to remember whether she had turned the oven on or if she had poured herself a glass of orange juice. "When you have to work hard to get those basic things back, you start to look at things differently," Cynthia Briggeman says. She opted to forgo further therapy. She decided she wanted to impact the lives of other people instead of feeling sorry for herself. It felt more like a wake up call."
SELLING 'ICE TO AN ESKIMO' Between her sleep-deprived nights with a colicky child, Briggeman had visited the website of Toys for Tots, a U.S. Marine Corps Reserve program, to see if she could donate some toys. She found that among items children requested were backpacks. She connected the dots in her mind and figured this was a need she would fill for military families. She never wavered in her belief that the backpacks would get to the children, that people would donate and everything would work out. That's because, Briggeman says, she knew she had the gift to inspire people. Since she was a kid, her friends told her she could sell "ice to an Eskimo." As a sales manager for a winery, she got the nickname "money" from her boss for the sales she racked up. But it took more than a sales pitch to get backpacks for military kids; it took shoe leather and hustle. It took wading through the military bureaucracy. "I am sure there's a measure of trepidation because we're a large organization," said Col. Chris Philbrick, garrison commander at Ft. Irwin army base in the Mojave. "The military is somewhat daunting to some. She was dogged in her determination to see it accomplished." REAL OC HOUSEWIVES Once Briggeman's idea gelled, her husband suggested forming a non-profit and hired an attorney to help. She called on a few of her best friends to help. Her mother, Janis Waite, became the secretary of the group. The women responded and knocked on doors seeking donations.
Money poured in. The non-profit the women named Pack for the Future raised $22,000 in 2005, its first year. "At that point we knew that this was going to work, because we struck a cord with people on a couple of different levels," Briggeman says. Most people know school supplies are essential, she says, and in the group they found a tangible and affordable way to thank the military. The red backpacks - at $10 each - filled with basic school supplies and a red, white or blue teddy bear with two stars sewn above its heart, started reaching children. That year the group handed out 2,200 backpacks at the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base. In 2006, 2,500 went to children at Camp Pendleton and another 2,500 were distributed last year at Ft. Irwin.