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| Mike Wisecup, Matt Shipman, Lew Emery and Chad Kalocinski after the first fundraiser in August 2014 which was a 13 mile swim |
In
2014, four active duty Navy SEALs participated in the inaugural SEALs for
Sunshine event, a 13-mile swim across Sebago Lake. On July 25th,
2019, SEALs for Sunshine will hold their sixth annual event with the longest
swim event to date.
Swimmers,
including SEALs for Sunshine founder, retired Navy SEAL Commander Michael
Wisecup, will navigate from Long Lake in Bridgton, through Naples into Brandy
Pond, down the Songo River and across the northern part of Sebago Lake, where
they’ll end their journey at Point Sebago, next door to Camp Sunshine.
Wisecup
started SEALs for Sunshine to raise awareness of what the camp could offer to
military families with children facing life threatening diseases. The first
event in 2014 coincided with Camp Sunshine’s 30-year anniversary campaign,
“Going the Distance. “Going the Distance
seemed to fit with a 13-mile half marathon swim across Sebago Lake,” Wisecup said.
Every
year since then, SEALs for Sunshine has held at least one intense physical
challenge to support the goal of raising money for military families to attend
Camp Sunshine. Just over $500,000 has been raised through these events,
prompting a significant increase in military families – both active duty and
veterans – attending camp. Many of these
families would not have known about Camp Sunshine without the publicity
surrounding these events, Wisecup said.
The
funds raised through SEALs for Sunshine events directly supports both
attendance at the camp and travel costs to alleviate the financial burden of
getting to and from camp, Wisecup said.
The
goal the first year was for each of the four swimmers to raise $2500, the
approximate cost of getting one family to camp. They ended up raising just over
$250,000. “We were blown away. There was so much support for it, support for
the camp, support for the military. It was really nice,” Wisecup said.
Since
that first event, SEALs for Sunshine participants collectively have swum 391
miles, biked 770 miles, run 116 miles, and put in 780 miles worth of stand-up
paddle boarding.
“We
try to do something different every year,” Wisecup said. “This year, we’re coming back into the
water.”
The
events are deliberately extremely physical challenges, Wisecup said, to bring
some awareness to the difficulty a family faces when their child receives a
life altering diagnosis. “At that
moment, that family has to fight for everything. They can’t quit. That’s a
cornerstone of the SEAL ethos - never quit,” Wisecup said.
While
participants have the benefit of preparation and training, families don’t have
that luxury, Wisecup said. “They don’t get to prepare their finances, their
life, and put everything in order,” he said. “We’re lucky to be able to
prepare, but we need to make it hard so that it connects, and it’s something we
can have in common with those families as well.”
This
year, according to a fundraising letter sent by Camp Sunshine Development
Director Michael Smith, there is a matching challenge from Ralph and Suzanne
Heckert and the Capital Group, so each donation made will be doubled.
SEALs
for Sunshine events have enabled more than 200 military families from across
the country to travel to Camp Sunshine, Smith said in the letter, but there are
many more who still need help.
Editor’s
note: Michael
Wisecup, has been named vice president for strategic initiatives at Colby
College.
His responsibilities include operationalizing and managing key strategic
initiatives, developing strategies and processes to assess and improve the
quality and effectiveness across all areas of the College, coordinating special
projects to ensure strategic alignment, increasing organizational focus, and
facilitating collaboration regarding strategic planning, execution, and crisis
management.
