The Yellow Ribbon Registry Network

The Yellow Ribbon Registry Network (www.registrynetwork.org ) is the nation’s first centralized online resource and clearinghouse where service members and veterans can fill out just one request for assistance and have their application quickly validated and submitted to multiple non-profit funding partners through the network for response to their critical needs. The site also allows individual citizens to provide donations to directly assist service members, veterans and military families in need.

Currently, when military members face financial difficulty - such as being behind on a house payment - they are frequently referred to databases such as the National Resource Directory, an online list of non-profits and other agencies who are there to assist military personnel with a range of issues.

The problem with such directories, however, is that they tend to be more like yellow-page or white-page listings of thousands of organizations.

So when a service member - or his or her spouse at home - hits an economic rough patch, they will often go online to apply for aid at one of these programs listed in the National Resource Directory and encounter a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process.

Individual applications - complete with a slew of identification forms, military orders, discharge notices, and other paperwork have to be emailed or faxed over and over again for each submission. Even more frustrating, after the process is completely, military personnel are often told that they don’t qualify for a given program for one reason or another.

The Yellow Ribbon Network hopes to change all that.

To date, those in need have primarily been referred to a range of published or online lists containing thousands of non-profits and other agencies that might possibly provide assistance. Although many of these outstanding organizations do have resources to offer, each has different qualifying criteria and specialized application requirements - including identification forms, military orders, discharge documents, and other paperwork.

Consequently, the urgent needs that often typify these scenarios are not able to be met in an expedited fashion, and members of the military, veterans and their families are not able to secure assistance in time to prevent the loss of a home, the repossession of the family’s automobile or countless other forms of hardship.

Col. David Sutherland, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sizing up the issue in a white paper called "The Sea of Goodwill: Matching the Donor to the Need," said the problem for so long hasn’t been getting dollars to help military members. The problem is that up until now no one group has stepped up to efficiently coordinate the flow of these dollars to America’s service members.