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Hey Everybody,
First I want to say thanks for being here! Building a new community into something viable is a huge challenge - but we can't do it without all of you!
A lot of the members don't know the story behind LDSPreppers and how it came to be or what our goals are, so I thought I would share them.
Before I do that though, I want to give Darin (AZ Prepper) HUGE recognition for all the work he's done here. We came up with this plan together but he's the one that has made it possible to turn this into a community. Without him, this site really wouldn't be here. Thanks for all your work brother!
In October of 2009 I was facing unemployment - the company I had been working for was going to shut down due to the economic turn-down - and didn't really want to go find another job. I had unemployment coming so I was kind of financially covered for a bit and I was interested in building a resource for my current calling, Ward Preparedness Coordinator. AZ Prepper and I had many conversations about how to do just that. We wanted to create a free resource that would be a huge help to Ward and Stake prep leaders since there wasn't really anything out there. We saw a lot of holes in that system and started brainstorming ways to fill them.
By the end of October, a huge plan was envisioned and execution on it began. I want to lay that vision out for you so you can understand what we're trying to accomplish. We are currently about 25% executed on this plan - meaning there is still a lot to come!
Our first goal was to build this community. LDSPreppers was born in October, I did all the technology work and AZ Prepper scoured the internet looking for the best articles he could find on all areas of preparedness and posting them .... for months. We knew that to build the type of resource we envisioned we would need to have the best info available from every aspect of prepping. We knew that to achieve our main goal, of creating a Ward/Stake prep leader resource, we had to create a valuable place to spend time. Our second objective is still working on taking off - that is to have a sub-community of Community Organizational Preparedness Leaders (mostly Ward/Stake) providing tons of information about how they do/did it.
One of our other goals was to make "group buys" a whole lot easier and hopefully make them be something of the past. To do this, we created a storefront. We figured that instead of doing a whole lot of work to arrange group buys and hopefully get enough people to get a discounted price and then have to deal with all the packing and shipping, we would become official dealers for all the stuff people want to group buy. By doing this, we would have access to distributor pricing and be able to offer great deals to our community. We're part way through that - we are getting new accounts and adding new items to the storefront daily.
Our plan is to provide a Creative Commons licensed Preparedness Newsletter at least once a month, possibly once a week. This means that we would send out the newsletter with full license to change everything in it to meet your needs. We intend for this newsletter to end up in the hands of Community Prep Leaders and for them in turn to hand it out to their community. In each newsletter we'll focus on a topic, whatever that topic is, we plan to offer a discount coupon for products that are related to that topic. This coupon will allow readers of the newsletter to be able to purchase the related items from the storefront at nearly wholesale prices. In doing this, we are hoping to help Community Prep Leaders maintain regular high quality communication with their members, provide them with excellent information on a prep topic and provide hugely discounted "group buy" prices to all the members of their community. You can expect to see the first such newsletter in the next week or so.
We've also created a newsletter wherein we offer HUGE unheard of prices for some of the items we are able to get our hands on. The items in this newsletter are a limited quantity and will require you to buy quickly if you want to make sure you get something.
In January, we were fortunate enough to have Kelly Alwood join us as a full partner (he had been doing a lot to help out before then). He brought in a wealth of knowledge, resources and experience that we are very grateful to have.
There are several other projects we have underway. For now, I can't really discuss them but know this, we plan to make it super easy for people to get everything they need for preparedness - far beyond just food storage.
You can expect to see a lot of new resources springing up over the next few months. We are hard at work creating them (usually all 3 of us put in close to 20 hours a day on this network) and are very excited to get everything finished and out there. Know that if you don't hear from me, AZ Prepper or Kelly Alwood very much here on the site, it means we're busy dedicating some of our time to building up other great resources for you.
LDSPreppers is and always will be a completely free resource. The storefront will be the cheapest prep store you'll be able to find. (Shopping there is how you can support LDSPreppers!)
We hope you enjoy the fruits of our labors and once again, are very glad that you're here!
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Originally Posted by Rizzo
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