9th Annual Mama Cindy Soldier Ride
Saturday, July 10, 2027 · 9 AM · Lakeville, New York
About this event
Soldier Ride is a Wounded Warrior Project programme, and this is not it. The name belongs to Cindy Strasburg of Hemlock, who has been called Mama Cindy for two decades by people she has never met.
It began with slippers and socks posted to a friend, Major Wendy Parsels, deployed to Iraq with the National Guard, and it never stopped. The Mama Cindy Soldier Program adopts deployed units and sends them monthly boxes of snacks, hygiene kit, baked goods and games. More than thirteen thousand soldiers in forty-two countries have had one, better than fifty thousand pounds of post in all. Fifteen to eighteen units are on the books at any time, rising to twenty-four at Christmas. There is no office and no salary, and Strasburg spends six to eight hours a day packing.
The ride is the Forged Alliance Riding Club's way of covering the postage, which is the real cost of the thing. Lakeville sits at the head of Conesus Lake, so the country is easy Finger Lakes riding.
What you are funding is a woman at a kitchen table with a tape gun, working out what a stranger overseas would want to find in a box.
Is this your event? If anything here is wrong — the date, the town, the details — or you would like to add to it, tell us and we will fix it.