The AFVC is also responsible for handling of the colors during the annual meeting of the NRLCA. In addition, the club has an annual drawing for national scholarships of $150.00 to help provide funds to eligible students. The number of scholarships drawn is determined each year by the amount of funds available in the AFVC treasury. These scholarships are provided to the son, daughter, grandson, or granddaughter of any member or associate member of the AFVC of the NRLCA who will be attending a college or other post high school program in pursuit of a higher education. Any state that has 100 members and associate members will automatically receive one scholarship recipient draw and one additional scholarship draw for each additional 100 members and associate members to be drawn prior to all the names being placed into the drawing.

The state officers of the Armed Forces Veterans Club (AFVC) would like to thank everyone who through their memberships, donations, time and efforts has made this year’s AFVC fundraising as successful as it was. Our goal is to provide to the children and grandchildren of Illinois Rural Carriers who are members of the AFVC a $100.00 scholarship to help in the costs of their post high school education. We do this through membership and fundraising.

This year we had 114 new and/or renewed memberships. There were many generous cash donations made. One of those donations was gifted in the name of Emily Anderson who passed away from us this last year. Emily was always deeply involved with the AFVC doing whatever she could with raffle donations, etc. to help with student scholarships, she will be missed. We also want to thank Janice Jeremiah for donating the beautiful handmade afghan and unique Tetris cups for the raffle prizes. The 50/50 again was a big hit with six different decks being drawn on.

At one point late in the convention it was announced that we were just short of being able to provide for all the scholarship applications we had received. We proceeded with our tradition of passing “Fuzz’s Hat” for donations around the room. Our National AFVC Vice President, Rick Houston and his wife Julie who had stopped to visit our convention pitched a hand in helping with the collection. With those donations we then had enough funds to provide a scholarship to every applicant. We were also honored when Rick lead the procession of the Retirement of the Colors that signified the closure of our 119th Illinois State convention.