A taste of home: Forgotten Soldiers Outreach sends holiday packages to 7,000 US troops

LAKE WORTH BEACH — Santa's workshop has nothing on the one run by Lynelle Chauncey Zelnar.

Founder of the Forgotten Soldiers Outreach — a 20-year-old nonprofit that sends care packages to U.S. troops overseas every month — Zelnar filled her Lake Worth Beach warehouse with bin upon bin of holiday goodies Saturday, to be sent to nearly 7,000 troops in the coming days.

The Christmas-style care packages include snacks, hygiene products, handwritten cards from students, and a mini-care package to give to any soldier who returns from the mailroom empty-handed.

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Zelnar, 60, runs a tight operation. She's got to if she wants to have all the packages ready to ship by the mailman's Dec. 1 arrival date. That means enlisting veterans, volunteers and their recruited relatives for an intergenerational assembly line.

Like soldiers, Zelnar's helpers — there were 10 of them Friday morning — packed the cardboard boxes dutifully. They beat the tops and sides with their fists to try getting the overstuffed cardboard to lay flat, then called Zelnar over for her stamp of approval. This proved to be the trickiest part.

"Look at all the empty space!" Zelnar said, sticking two fingers into a care package stuffed to the brim. "Oh, my gosh. This won't do."

Getting Zelnar's blessing means adhering to the "no air" rule. If she can find a space among the box's crammed contents big enough to stick her pinky finger into, it isn't packed full enough.

"I know she's going to say there's more space," whispered one of the teenaged helpers. "But there's not."

There was.

Zelnar has been doing this officially since 2003. The care packages numbered in the tens then, rather than the thousands, and they were inspired by a co-worker's request to pray for her son — a young man named Chris who served in Iraq with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

"I thought I'd do more for him than just pray," said Zelnar, who worked in property management at the time.

She began making care packages for Chris and his friends, then for more and more soldiers as the word spread. The Palm Beach County School Board joined in and encouraged students to write letters to accompany each package.

Attention from the media, including a stint on "Good Morning America," propelled Zelnar's grassroots movement into something official and nationally recognized: Forgotten Soldiers Outreach.

Zelnar retired from property management to run the nonprofit full time. She maintains an online registry where the names of more and more soldiers and their mailing addresses appear every day.

The whopping 6,900 on it now is a record for the group. Zelnar and her band of volunteers provide for each one every month with the help of community support and a few mega-wealthy donors.

Though the U.S. withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 2021, active duty soldiers are still stationed across the globe. Forgotten Soldiers Outreach ships its care packages to Kuwait, Iraq, Germany, Poland, Bahrain and South Korea, Zelnar said — just to name a few.

Some soldiers have specific needs, like allergy medicine, which the nonprofit keeps track of and outfits its care packages accordingly.

"We make sure they get the essential items, the feel-good items, the comfort-from-home items," Zelnar said. "And of course, the letters of encouragement to help boost their morale, because that's what we're truly about."

She added that she never expected to still be doing this in 2022. Her hope is for Forgotten Soldiers Outreach to one day close its doors for good, when all the troops have returned home.

Zelnar wore a Santa hat as she walked through the assembly line Saturday, reminding the volunteers: Bulky things fit best at the bottom of the box. And there's always room for sunscreen.

She moved from worker to worker, poking fun at and guiding them, helping reorganize the contents of the care packages like a game of Tetris. Don't be afraid to put your back into it when taping the box shut, she said. Soldiers will still eat a bag of Doritos even if it's crushed.

It's easier that way, quipped Kim House, a veteran and Forgotten Soldiers Outreach volunteer who mimicked slurping crumbs from a bag of chips.

"All right," said Ed Brookes, who, for the first 30 minutes of packing Saturday, had yet to pass muster in Zelnar's eyes. "This one is perfect."

He laughed, because he knew it probably wasn't.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Lake Worth Beach charity sends more care packages than ever to troops