UPDATE - Winter/Fall 2011     The Board of Directors and our teams of volunteers are proud to welcome back Michelle Marco, who has reassumed her duties as the Executive Director for our entire San Diego operations. Michelle comes to us with an extensive educational and non-profit background with strong international links.     Michelle Marco originally hails from San Diego, California. After attending Stanford University, where she earned a degree in Art History, Michelle moved to London to obtain a Master's Degree in Art Business from the prestigious Sotheby's Institute of Art. In 2005, she was awarded a Master's Degree in Graduate Gemology from the Gemological Institute of America. In 2009 she received a law degree from the University of Sydney, where Michelle was a member of the Young Lawyers' Association, as well as an active participant in the Sydney University Law Society's Women's Journal, Yemaya. She is also the founder of Redress, a charity which donates used suits and other clothing to legal aid recipients.     In Michelle's first year as Executive Director of Sox in a Box, she has worked to expand the scope of our deliveries to both far-off destinations as well as those close at hand, from Japan to Missouri. She has also completely restructured the way in which volunteers work together to ensure a more efficient, productive, and satisfying experience for everyone involved in Sox in a Box. As well as extending our network to include churches and other religious organizations, Michelle is currently in talks with other charities such as Undies for Everyone and Tom's Shoes in order to combine our giving-power and maximize donations for everyone in need on a global scale. A published author, in her spare time, Michelle enjoys writing, traveling, playing the harp, and shooting archery.     This past summer, Michelle, as well as our founder, Dani Marco, pooled their talents to develop a new mailing system in which boxes of socks can be shipped expeditiously and with less freight costs. After extensive meetings with the Board of Directors, the decision was made to ship new pairs of socks without their decorated take-out boxes in certain emergency situations where the socks have to reach their destinations in a very short time, i.e., after an earthquake or a tornado. The Board of Directors and other attendees agreed that the price of air freight has now become cost-prohibitive and is preventing us from reaching out to people whose homes have been demolished and whose personal possessions have been destroyed after the many natural disasters that have struck our country this year. Without the socks being placed into boxes, we will save approximately one-third of our shipping costs and can ship the socks at a speedier rate. Another idea presented at the Board of Director's meeting is that we should buy a small truck or van to deliver our socks. One of our Directors at the meeting told us that it is possible to buy a used U-Haul truck in fairly good condition for less than $4000. The suggestion was made that we could paint the truck with our logo and we could drive the socks out to places in need within U.S. boundaries. The down side, however, is that with gas prices being what they are, the Board still can't decide if buying a truck is in our best interests. A further suggestion was made that we contact relief agencies and ask them to piggyback our shipments with theirs. Unfortunately, our previous attempts to arrange exactly such an effort have resulted in disclaimers in the sense these organizations cannot guarantee the safety or delivery of our socks.     For this reason, our plans for the rest of this year and into 2012 is to align ourselves more closely with both corporate and church-based entities. We need to find responsible organizations and companies who ship all over the U.S. or travel abroad and would be willing to load our boxes of socks and letters of hope and inspiration onto their trucks, trains, or air shipments. For example, word of mouth this past Spring resulted in members of the U.S. military delivering our socks by jet to several places around the world including Iraq, Afghanistan, and to Okinawa, Japan by way of the local Marines stationed near Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Two very large churches in the Southern California area have taken several thousand pairs of our socks to orphanages in various parts of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Everyone from a huge trucking conglomerate doing business with Limey's Lorries in San Diego along with the generosity of one of Southern California's biggest professional medical supply companies have allowed us to piggyback our socks onto their freight beds destined for places both here and to Haiti and parts of the Dominican Republic.     All these efforts would not be possible without the donations and support from our some of our most recent donors and relief expediters including America Express, Wedbush Morgan, Bank of America, Kraft Foods Foundation, and the many donations of socks by sincere donors that we receive daily through the mail. Most of all, we need to express our thanks to the hundreds of students and teachers throughout Southern California who have work tirelessly to collect and assemble our socks as well as, in some cases, to translate our letters of hope and inspiration into many different languages including our last effort of this past month of translating almost seven hundred letters by middle school aged children into the language used by many people in Afghanistan called Farsi.     Our email addresses for contacting us have changed. Please feel free to contact us at the following new addresses: daniellerosemarco@gmail.com mmarco@stanfordalumni.org The SOX IN A BOX teams of volunteers