 All right. Good afternoon. So up next we have Mr. Brooke McLean. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Air Force Enlisted Village. Mr. McLean, like I said, is the Chief Executive Officer for the Air Force Enlisted Village. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing the largest senior living community in Northwest Florida. The mission of the Air Force Enlisted Village is to provide a home to widows of retired airmen, mothers of active duty service members and retired military couples. Prior to being selected to his current position, Mr. McLean served in the United States Air Force for 30 years and served in many locations including Hawaii, Florida, Kuwait, England, Germany, Korea, Arkansas, Colorado and California. He also served as a senior enlisted leader in numerous organizations, culminating in his position as the Command Chief Master Sergeant for Pacific Air Forces. Without further ado, Mr. McLean. All right. Thank you. All right. Well, congratulations Chiefs. I know this is a big day for you, day one. I'm sure you're probably all ready to get out of here. I know that there's somebody else that's going to brief behind me that you may be looking forward to. However, I want to just take a couple minutes and give you a quick overview of the Air Force Enlisted Village. Some of you may not have heard of us before. That's okay. Hopefully after this you'll have a better sense of who we are and what we do and why it's important for you as Chiefs and why it's important for our Air Force to support and be involved with the Air Force Enlisted Village. So over the years we have done this a number of different times and people have heard this briefing a lot of times. What they do when they come to the Air Force Enlisted Village is they drive around, they look at it and the first thing they say is, I had no idea it looked like this. So we picked up a clue. We said, let's make a video. So we got a video that's going to show you a drone that flies around the campus. And Chief Green's still laughing because he saw this not too long ago and afterwards he said, Brooke, he says, where are all the people in the video? So I got it. There's no people in the video. But trust me, we got 500 people that live there. I got 500 supervisors that help me every day to make sure that we take care of this place. So let's go ahead and roll the video and then I'll come back and give you a briefing. So we're a 501C3 non-profit Air Force Charity. There's only four Air Force Charities that are official in the eyes of the Air Force and that's us, the LeMay Foundation, Loose Guys of Texas, which is our counterpart organization out in San Antonio and the Air Force Aid Society. So those are the big four. I'm going to run through the slide deck here and let you take a look. I've been doing this for about 60 years now. I took over for Chief Binnaker when he passed away about four years ago. As a matter of fact, it was four years ago this month that he passed away. He was our CEO for 15 years prior to me coming over and before he passed away. Incredible legacy. He did so much for our organization and so much for our Air Force, of course. But I'll tell you, as we go through here, you're going to see some things where his fingerprints are all over the work that we do. Our primary mission is taking care of a widow of an Air Force retired enlisted member. Back in the day, 50 years ago, we stood up and our title was a mouthful. It was the Air Force Enlisted Men's Widows Home. It truly was set up to take care of widows of enlisted members only. We did that for a number of years. We transitioned. We've opened up a little bit. We've expanded our mission a little bit and we're looking at making some more expansions in the future. But we go back, always go back, to taking care of the widow of our retired Air Force enlisted member. That's our number one priority. So we're in pretty good location. Tucked in right between Eglin Air Force Base and Herbert Field down in Fort Walton Beach. So if you get a chance to come down and visit us, please do so. This is an amazing campus. It's a great charity, a great cause, a great thing to be involved with. So we welcome visitors whenever you get a chance to come over. We picked Fort Walton Beach specifically and it wasn't because of the weather. It wasn't because it was really close to Destin and really nice and stuff. When we stood up to the organization, we looked around the United States and we wanted to go to a place that was really strong military community. Fort Walton Beach was that place and it's not just a strong military community. It's a strong Air Force community. All over the place down there, you see airman symbols and the connectedness that we have is just incredible. So we're very fortunate to have that location. So this is just a top view. You can see it a little bit here. 125 acres. We've got 350 independent living units and we've got 66 assisted living units. Now many of you probably haven't had any experience with people getting old in your life. Some of you may have. Some of you may have dealt with aging parents or aging grandparents and you see as they get a little bit older, maybe you don't want to deal with gutters, leaky roofs, yard maintenance, those kind of things. When you get to that point, you want to move in some place to be taken care of. That's what independent living is. You're still on your own. You drive your own car. You do your own thing. You cook your own meals. When you get a little farther along and you need a little bit more assistance, then you go into assisted living. That's where we have the Hawthorne House and that's where typically people need assistance with medications and some meals. So those are the levels of care that we provide. Boil it all down. Our mission is to provide a home. Chief Binnaker provided the mom rule to us. We ask ourselves these three questions as our golden rule of how we interact with one another, especially with our residents. Would you do it to your mom? Would you do it for your mom? Would your mom approve? So assuming that you like your mom, if you answer yes to these three questions, you're probably going to be in pretty good shape. It's provided a great guidepost for us and it's become a value statement for us really about how we take care of our residents. So I said we take care of widows. That's our number one priority. A great mission. We have about 70% of the residents of the 500 that we have there are widows. So even though we've changed, we've adapted, we've added in some couples and some other things, we still stay with that primary mission. We also have moms. We have special category to take care of moms of active duty members. Typically this comes from Eglin or Herbert, where mom has come back and lives with the active duty member and then mom, excuse me, the active duty member gets PCS orders and needs to leave and goes someplace where mom can't go, like Turkey or Korea or Japan. So at that point mom can come over and stay with us. And we have about 20 of those that fall in that special category. We also have active duty spouse allowance and that typically is us being flexible as far as if there's a fire, a flood, a fatality, anything happens to an active duty member or their family, we try to help. We have 350 independent living units. At any given time we have apartments that are in some type of turnover and we have a couple guest apartments. So we're able to help. We look forward to doing that and we try to reach out and work very closely with commanders and the chiefs of the installations. Unfortunately what we typically find though is that it really is very localized. It's only down in Herbert and Eglin that people really use us. But we are open to anybody that needs assistance. Not long ago Chief Wright was out on a visit out at Shepherd and he ran across someone that was in this exact situation. The master sergeant was supposed to be going to Turkey. Mom lived with her and they didn't know what they were going to do with mom. And so we started working with her. It turned out that the master sergeant got her orders changed so she didn't have to but we were there and we were going to be that resource for her if she needed it. And then we also have couples. This is Mr. Clarence Darje and his wife. They were in residence with us for a long time. He was kind of a crusty old guy. He would tell you that demographically based on the actuary tables women outlive men. Sorry guys that's the fact. If you go look the actuary tables the women are going to outlive men. Clarence Darje would tell you that the men died because they wanted to. We get some real personalities down there. So by the numbers this slide will build out as we go along. We're one of a kind organization. There is not another enlisted village. No army, no Navy, no Marine Corps enlisted village. We're the only one in the nation that does the mission that we do. You can see some of the numbers as it built out. We've been around for a long time. We have about 500 residents now. We had one lady that lived with us. She passed away about a year ago. She was 104 when she passed away. She lived with us for 41 years. So she moved in with us in 1976 and then just passed away about a year ago. Remarkable lady. We have grown over the years. We have changed. We have adapted. We have morphed. You can see the numbers here. Village 5 was our new units that we opened up about three years ago. We have a new construction project that's ongoing. You'll see some pictures of that in just a second. That's Village 6. That's adding 63 new units. And the reason why we're doing that is because America is getting older. If you look around and you look at the demographics, you look at the baby boomers who were born 1946 to 1964. That baby boomer generation is starting to move up in the years. And so they're now starting to get to the point to where they want to go into a retirement community. There is an incredible amount of people that are turning 65 every year. There's 9 million people. Now I said that wrong. There's 3 million people a year that are turning 65. Hang on. I've got my numbers backed up. 9 million people a year. I knew it. I had it right the first time. Which equates to, I completely lost my math. Math in public is not going to work for me today. Let's just say that there's a lot of people turning 65 every year. So these ladies all lived in all of our communities. We've had a number of different locations over the year. We had Teresa Village, which is our first property. And then we had a couple others. And they all lived in the different communities over the years. So the lady in the back is Ms. Faustine Dean. She lived in Teresa Village. She lived in Bob Hope Village. She lived over in Hawthorne House. Eventually she started living over in our memory care, memory support wing. She had Alzheimer's. So she wasn't thinking real clearly towards the end of her life. But she had had an incredible life. She grew up really poor in South Carolina. Smoked cigarettes until the day she died. Couldn't get her to quit that. We tried really hard. Loved Dr. Pepper. It was one of her passions. So she woke up one night about 3 o'clock in the morning. She didn't really know where she was. We have telephones. We have the emergency buzzers. We have pendants that residents wear. Well, she woke up at about 3 o'clock in the morning and decided that she wanted a Dr. Pepper. But she wasn't thinking real clear. So she reaches over and she picks up the phone and she dials 911 to order Dr. Pepper. Which is kind of sort of funny. But what's really nice about it is about 30 minutes later the sheriff showed up with a Dr. Pepper for her. And I love that because that really shows how much our community understands us. The fact that Fort Walton Beach in Okaloosa County the police understand what it is that we do and they help us and support us is just incredible. So this is just a demographic snapshot. This is the Hawthorne House. Red is all widows. There's a couple very busy widowers that live there as well. Yeah, you laugh, you laugh. We had one lady that was 94. She was dating another resident. He was 92 and they called her a cougar because she was dating a young guy. Similar demographic over in the independent living side. This is where you see more of the couples that are living there. And we see this trend starting to grow. There's more and more couples that want to move in with us. We started construction on our new campus or excuse me our new facility about three months ago. That's the 63 new units. And that's because we can't move the couples in that want to live with us. We have a wait list of about 300 couples that want to move in with us. There's about 60 of them that are ready to move right away. We decided as a board and Alan is one of our board members and Chief Wright is one of our board members. We decided that we needed to move out and we needed to build more to be able to take care of more people. So we're really excited about it. There's a lot going on with it. I mentioned earlier that Bob Hope Village is the name of one of our communities. Bob Hope was a good friends with a gentleman that's on the left in this photo, Colonel Bob Gates. Wing Commander Herbert back in the day had been Mr. Hope's USO pilot. So Bob Hope came down into the community, came and did fundraisers for us for the longest time, really helped our organization start off and get to where it is today. Unfortunately, when I go out and I brief him in leadership schools and I talk about this, a lot of them will raise a hand and say who's Bob Hope? So that's just kind of the way that goes. So we were very fortunate to have the connection that we have had with him. So let's talk money real quick. We have about $11 million a year budget. A lot of that comes from donations from you. Either through the Air Force Assistance Fund, which is coming up very soon. So that's a foot stomper. Air Force Assistance Fund is coming up soon. The other thing is we get donations from the private orgs like AFSA and top three, first sergeants, chiefs groups. They make donations. Spouses clubs make donations to us, which is very fortunate. We also do a number of other different fundraising efforts throughout the year. But the money that comes into us helps support the overall operation. The Air Force Assistance Fund money that comes in is fenced and that can only go to the direct support of retired Air Force enlisted widow. So that money can't be used on anything else. So we watch that very closely. We spent about $900,000 last year in direct support to widows. So we spend a lot of money and we help a lot of people, which is a great thing. So here's another foot stomper. CFC is not the Air Force Assistance Fund. I'm getting that look from you because we know this. But trust me, there's a lot of people that don't know this. In the fall, you get the Big Fat Charity Book with 3,000 charities. In the spring, you get the Air Force Assistance Fund. You get four charities to choose from. So we're in the one with only four. So please help us to let people know what the difference of those are. There's great charities in both of them. And I encourage you to do some type of giving, regardless of who you give your money to. And I'll talk just a little bit more about that in a second. So this was a fall day last year. You probably can't see it very well, but Chief Wright, Mrs. Goldfein, and Manny Panaro are kneeling down in the front. We had been working some hurricane relief support for Hurricane Michael down at Tyndall. We started off just this little operation and thought, well, we'll gather some supplies and we'll try to help. We ended up after a couple days with a huge room full of supplies, water, diapers, hygiene items, food. So we loaded up our first truck and we went down like two days after the hurricane went in. And I'll tell you, I know some of you probably were at Tyndall or have been down there and helped out. It was mind-blowing to go in there and to see what that looked like. It was like a zombie land with people driving around without windshields in their car. They were just in... They were in a daze. I mean, it was incredible. We came back from that and we said, okay, we got to do more. So we started collecting more. We started getting more donations that came in. We ended up with about $450,000 worth of cash and supplies that were donated. And we would load those up, not in GOVs, but in people's private trucks and in their private trailers, and they would launch out every morning and drive down. We'd unload the room and then the end of the day, that room would be full again and they'd come back the next day and we'd do it again. And it was amazing to see the airmen that would come out because we would end up with probably 30 airmen every morning that would come out and volunteer their time before they went to work to help us load out. And then they would come back the next day and they said, this is something that we get involved with. This is something where we can give back. It's really amazing time for them and for us as well. You know what? Let me go back. This is a funny story. The lady on the left is Alicia. Alicia, you may have seen, she's nominated as military spouse of the year for one of the companies. I can't remember which one it is. She started off, she was on Facebook with some friends right after the storm, and she said, hey, she said, I will take donations and I will make sure that they get down to Tyndall. This is the spouse's network that was coming together. So the key spouses that she was in touch with, they had like three or four people that were in this group. She said, you send it to me, I'll make sure it gets down there. So day one she gets about 30 packages. She goes, oh, okay, that's pretty good. And then somebody goes out and puts an Amazon registry together that's a Tyndall support group. And then they do an Amazon registry and a target registry and then a Walmart registry. And so the next day, the post office called her and says, she said, well, just deliver it to my house. She lives in Crestview, which is about 20 minutes away from us. They said, ma'am, we have 900 packages that have showed up. We have nine pallets of mail that we need to provide to you. So she reached out. She saw what we were doing. She said, I need your help. So we sent a bunch of people up to Crestview, picked up all the packages, and we re-diverted all those packages that were in route. And so for about the next month, we would get 50 to 60 packages a day that would come in from these different registries. We'd open the boxes, import all the stuff, repack the boxes. Based on what was being requested from the people down at Tyndall and Panama City and some of the surrounding communities, we would specifically load out the needs that they had. So it was really just a remarkable time. Heartwarming for everybody that was involved with it. And for the airmen, like I said, the airmen that got to go down and they would ride shotgun and go help unload, they would come back and you could see in their eyes that they had been changed by the work that they were doing. So I talked real quick about Village 6. This is what it's going to look like. It'll be a beautiful campus. These are artist's renditions of what it will look like on the interior. They're going to be two-bedroom, two-bath, open, HGTV approved. They'll be nice. And I mentioned earlier, we started off and we've changed. We've grown over the years. For the longest time, we as an Air Force patted ourselves on the back and said, we're the only service that has a retired community that takes care of and listed. And I go to church with this big sergeant major, a retired dude that came up to me one day. He goes, how come I can't move into your community? I said, because we don't let the army in. We only do Air Force. And he said, well, why not? He said, you guys should change that. So I went back, I started talking with the board and more and more that resonated with me and as I looked across and because we're in a unique position, we started off, we bought 125 acres of land from the Air Force. We built the community. We're able to provide a unique service that would be almost impossible for somebody to duplicate at this point because we've been doing it for so long and we're so good at it. So we thought, well, let's just, let's just change it. Let's try to create another community. Let's take advantage of what we already know how to do. So the board says, we're going to look to do joint service community. Let's figure out how to do this. So we started off, we were calling it Victory Village. It's going to be 80 acres of land. It's going to provide services for all uniform retirees. Maybe some officers, we're not sure about that. We'll have to see how much we can charge them for that. It helps our community. Retirees, if you don't know, retirees are huge economic engines. When you move into a community, you get, you come in there and you bring your retirement pay with you. You don't have a lot of kids in school, typically. You don't put a lot of demands on your local community services. So people love retirees. So our local cities in our county love this idea. We've got great support from them. One of the things that we're looking at is right here. This wounded warriors. We have looked around and nobody is really looking at caring for wounded warriors as they age. Think of the 30-year-old Staff Sergeant, Air Force or Army that was wounded in 2005. So now 14 years later, they're dealing with their traumatic injuries still. They're still struggling. They're getting up there in age and nobody is studying what aging is going to look like for a wounded warrior. Because I don't think anybody really knows. We certainly don't know, but what we know is we know how to take care of people. We know how to provide transportation. We know how to provide security. We know how to provide housing. And we know that Eglin Air Force Base and a VA clinic and a place called the Invisible Wounds Center are right about three miles away from where we are. So we envision having wounded warriors that are part of our victory village community. So this is where it will be. This is our current campus. That's 125 acres. That's the 80 acres of land that we're going to get from Eglin. This is just an architect's rendition of what it might look like. We're moving out on this. Last year in the NDAA, it was approved for the 80 acres to transfer from Eglin to us. They want us to pay for it. We would prefer to get it for free. So we've gone back to ask if they will amend that language so that we can get that. We're moving out on the fundraising, the fundraising, looking at different ways that we can adapt the community because we see it really being a platform for different ideas. Who knows what we might be able to do with the land that's there. There's a number of different marketing and partnership things that we could do. But it's all going to revolve around taking care of enlisted members, retired enlisted members, wounded warriors. So I got about three minutes left before I get kicked off, maybe a little bit longer than that. I wanted just to give you a couple closing thoughts. And I might get a little bit preachy, so you have to forgive me on this as I go through. A couple weeks ago, a pastor at church talked about a mission trip that he had gone on to Africa. He'd been on many different mission trips to Africa. This one in particular was going to a pastor's conference. So they were coming together with pastors from their different regions of Africa. They were going to teach, they were going to edify, they were going to educate, they were going to build up. And one of the things that they decided that they needed to talk about during this pastor's conference was why it was important for the pastors not to hit and beat their wives. Now you may be going, I didn't think we'd really need to brief that too much at a pastor's conference. But the culture in Africa is very different than our culture. And what is accepted there is not accepted here. So the pastors there took the challenge on to highlight the cultural blind spots that the people were dealing with. So it's fair to ask, what cultural blind spots are we not dealing with in ours? And there's quite a few. But I'll just highlight a couple of them. First one is money. We as a nation are incredibly wealthy. We have opportunities. We have a somewhat dysfunctional, mostly supportive government operation that helps support people. We have opportunities. We have resources. We really have the opportunity to be able to set people up and to succeed. You think about Airman Basin going down a bomb run over at Lackland this Friday. Friday morning, they're going to graduate. They're going to go across there. They're going to come on, stay on active duty. They're going to earn, as an E-1, a whopping $1,500 a month. $1,500 a month puts you in the top 10% of wage earners in the world. As an E-1 with no skills, just making it through basic training. You are in the top 10% of wage earners. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. I think our challenge is where we spend that money and what we do with it. Because we're blessed to be able to have the resources that we do. And I think in a lot of cases, we just kind of push it off, and we don't pay attention to where it goes. We worry about cars. We worry about houses. We worry about things that are maybe not as important as they should be. And that's okay. I mean, I get it. I got a nice car. I want a nice house. We all want that. But it doesn't mean that that's all that your focus needs to be. Philanthropy should be a big part of everything that we do, because it gives back and it supports people and it helps our entire culture. So that's one of the blind spots. Second blind spot is how we take care of the elderly. Our nation does a very poor job of taking care of old people. You look around at some of the other nations that are around some of the other cultures. They hold their elderly in high esteem. They give them honor. They give them praise. They lift them up and support them. We make fun of them. We say, ah, they can't operate an iPhone. Ha! They drive too slow. They don't hear very well. It's really sad when you think about it. I mean, these people have invested their lives. They're our parents. They're our grandparents. And I see it every day over in the Hawthorne House, our assisted living facility. We have people that live, the caregivers for them are thousands of miles away often. It'll take days to get there if they're needed. Forget a weekend trip. That'll never happen. Then you have people that are 10 miles away and they don't come visit either. So it's sad that our culture accepts that. And you think about what we need to do and how we need to move forward on that. We have people that are in our community that sacrificed, served in a time that we can't understand. You know, we are all in a time or you are all in a time on active duty to where people support you. People will buy you Starbucks if you go to the airport and you're in uniform. There was a time when that didn't happen. And so they lived a much different life than what we have. And so I think we owe them the support that they deserve for the sacrifices they made. So as I said, I'm going to get a little preachy. So you have to just forgive me on that one. But I do just want to take an opportunity to invite you to visit us if you ever get a chance. We have lots of social media that's out there. We're on Facebook. Tons of YouTube videos. There's lots of really funny, entertaining videos which are not what the briefing that you just had is. But there's lots of good things that are out there. You can hit us up if you have any questions. I typically forget to mention that we're open to Guard and Reserve. So I will make sure that I say that as well. So Guard and Reserve retirees are eligible to live with us. And again, we're making provisions to be able to open it up and do more for more people. So with that, I think I'm almost on time, maybe a couple minutes early. I might have time for like one or two questions as long as we're not hard. Well, I'm going to take the opportunity to get off the stage before somebody asks me that hard question. I want to say thank you very much. Congratulations again from your Air Force Enlisted Village. If you get an opportunity to come visit us, please do so. We're very passionate about what we do. The care that we provide for the residents down there. I'll tell you, your heart will be warm if you come down and spend a little bit of time and talk with some of our residents. We have great volunteers that come from all over the southeast to come and work with us and to support us and we're very grateful for that. So again, thank you very much for your time. I hope you have a great day and congratulations again. Thank you.