Report highlights ways the Legion makes a difference

The American Legion’s Consolidated Post Report is an opportunity for posts to document every activity they fulfilled in a 12-month (June 1-May 31) reporting period – whether it’s providing funeral honors, hosting Memorial Day or Veterans Day ceremonies, sponsoring youth to attend a Legion program, conducting fundraising efforts and more.

The recently compiled 2015 CPR revealed that posts provided more than four million community service volunteer hours, conducted more than 7,000 Memorial Day and Veterans Day services, participated in 1,065 veteran job fairs, provided 123,014 funeral honors, awarded 10,308 scholarships to youth, performed 30,023 U.S. flag presentations, presented 8,426 ROTC medals, and much more.

These, however, are not the final numbers for the entire American Legion. Only 8,900 posts submitted a CPR – a 67 response rate from the 13,290 total posts worldwide, leaving a third of posts’ activities unaccounted for.

It’s important for the CPR response rate to increase so that the great work Legion posts and members are doing in their communities is reflected. Especially since newly elected American Legion National Commander Charles E. Schmidt will deliver the report to Congress during his testimony in February, but will only be able to share part of the figures. In a day when we have to fight for all we can from Congress, whether it is funding for the VA system, military pay for our troops or direct benefits for our local communities, it is imperative that we speak as one voice. The best, and at times most influential, way we can do that is when our posts let National Headquarters know what they are doing in their respective communities.

Posts are strongly encouraged to fill out and submit CPRs, whether in paper-based form or online through www.mylegion.org. Only 22 percent of post officers filled out the 2015 CPR form online, which required American Legion national staff to manually type in the more than 6,000 reports submitted by paper – a time-consuming endeavor. Submitting CPRs through MyLegion is not only faster, but posts can continually update the form throughout the reporting year. And once finalized and submitted electronically, a PDF of the CPR is automatically generated and sent to the posts respective department and to National Headquarters.

The 2016 CPR will be available Nov. 1 on www.mylegion.org, and it will be located on the left-hand side under "Member/Post Processing."