Meet Steph Durbin | Executive Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with Steph Durbin and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Steph, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?

Professions in the military carry a ton of inherent risk, and one thing the military specializes in is mitigating that risk well. Unfortunately, sometimes that risk outweighs the specific mitigation practices that are tried and true to military operations safe successes. My husband (goes by TUCKY) is in the fast jet business as a fighter pilot and we have had the most amazing life living in multiple countries meeting and keeping the best of friends. My husband has been on active duty since 2012 and unfortunately has personally known 2 friends that passed far before their time. We saw both instances have crowdfunding efforts to help support the friends and families left behind via GoFundme, both of which garnered over $50,000. These funds raised were from individuals, small donations, without massive corporate sponsorship or anything like that. We have always talked about how the fighter community is very spread out, but can rally for great cause at the drop of a hat. We then dug a little deeper and realized that the very close friends/family were the ones burdened with setting up these GoFundme’s and garnering support via social media or word of mouth. That didn’t sit well with Tucky, especially because the two bros we lost were some of the best dudes he’s ever met and as he said, “we’re (the fighter community) better than that, there’s got to be a better way for these guys.” So, we dug around the interwebs a bit and found that there were some wonderful folks out there that had organizations that supported fallen aviators, but there seemed to be a small gap in coverage when it came to purely mobilizing funds toward the first of kin. We vowed to figure something out that night and sure enough the next morning Tucky was already on his third cup of coffee working away at 7AM. We basically wanted to make an entity that maximized funds towards first of kin, and was able to be as strong, if not stronger than a GoFundme.

What should our readers know about your business?

We have literally gone from a kitchen table idea to having an outreach to over 700,000 people and written over $200,000 in checks to first of kin of USAF aerial mishaps in two years. Both My husband and I are nowhere near business majors nor have we ever had any experience in business, finance, nonprofit law, etc… This has been a pretty tough road, seeing as we have two kids under 4 at the time of startup and Tucky regularly works 60 hours a week on average. The rest of our staff also works long hours and is geographically separated from us. I am by far most proud of our community, and when I say community, I mean the Aviation community as a whole. We set out to unite efforts of what we call the “Bro Net” in order to take care of each other and through the couple years we’ve been around I feel we have gotten close to that. I mean the proof is in the pudding, these people of all walks of life and stature have joined together locally and internationally to be a part of our Fallen Wings Family. Beyond simply wanting more time in the day to accomplish foundation work, we’ve truly been able to succeed because of the legal advisors we had in the beginning, pro bono at that! Our skeleton so to speak was set up well and the advice and mentoring from the Wingman Foundation has really vectored us toward success. The part that folks need to know about us is that we are just bros helping bros (literally and figuratively of course).  We humbly take responsibility of setting up crowd-sourced fundraising campaigns that gain international exposure and EVERY CENT goes direct to the next of kin. We are all volunteer and take nothing from the foundation. This year we are also able to help bases/communities with memorials as well, so we will look to fulfill the second part of our mission, the continued support of our fallen bros legacies.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We just moved to AZ and haven’t ever had a chance to live it up in Denver. What we imagine is that it would be filled with tons of microbrews, wine tastings, craft cocktails, and some of the most amazing mountain foods.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Really this has been a success story brought forth by the most damning of circumstances and we have been able to hopefully affect change and positivity in our support for these bros. The staff we work with is very close to us and we just absolutely love working with them. Bear, Janée, YoMateo, and Ox are all amazing humans. The process has been truly us falling forward and learning as we go. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Jack CHILI Guevarra and The Wingman Foundation. They literally answered our cold call one day and have believed in us every step of the way and been our strongest mentor.

Website: https://www.fallenwingsfoundation.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefallenwingsfoundation/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheFallenWings1

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thefallenwingsfoundation/