To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Tom Hufford, AKA "Huffy the Firefighter Clown" president of "Huffy and Friends" the Tulsa Firefighter's Educational Clowns. We are a non-profit organization put together by off duty Tulsa Firefighters and many other volunteers in 1984. We are non-profit group funded only through private and corporate donations, and fundraisers. We need your help to keep going. . .

Our main goal is to teach life and fire safety education in 8 major safety topic areas, to as many children and parents as possible to prevent injuries and deaths, with the volunteer hours, donated funds, and materials that we can generate. By doing this we can help eliminate the terrible affects that come with preventable injuries and fire. We now see over 132,000 people a year. We volunteer our time, but we must turn to the community for financial support, and material donations for the many safety programs, safety events, burn camp, and other projects that we provide free to the community. We have many awards to show that we mean business.

In other countries fires are looked at as a failure of the fire prevention education efforts. Other injuries and deaths are a failure of safety education. Unfortunately here in the U.S. the mind set is that these terrible events are unpreventable acts that just happens, and we react to it after the fact. This is just not true! A lot of them can be prevented! We are trying to change this way of thinking. Education and prevention is the key to preventing fires, injuries, and saving lives and property.

The three main causes of accidents and fires are men, women, and children. Most accidents can be prevented with proper education and preventative actions. When we (as Tulsa Firefighters) respond to an incident involving a burned person or a person in any of the top eight preventable injury areas, ( especially a child ) we have an emptiness feeling inside, why did this happen? Our way to battle this is to do as much as possible to educate the community to help prevent future incidents.

The next page describes the projects and steps that we have been taking as the Tulsa Firefighters Educational Clowns to improve the Life's and Safety of the Tulsa Community and the surrounding area.

• We teach over 132,000 children and parents, Life and Fire Safety information annually in Schools, Churches, Day Care Centers, and Special Events. We do this through our safety programs, safety coloring books, brochures, media coverage, and our video called "Stop Drop and Roll with Huffy the Clown" free at all Tulsa County Libraries. (We are breaking national records in public safety education) The cost for this is around $30,000.00 annually.

• We put on Oklahoma's only "Burn Camp" for children that are a victim of burns and/or disfigurement injuries of any kind. Scars to the body, arms, legs and face that might make the child self conscious about the way they look to others in public. We have had great results in helping these kids with a one-to-one camper/councilor relationship! Annual cost for this camp is $15,000.00. - Note: Our main goal is to educate children with preventable injury safety information to prevent them from ever having to go to our Burn Camp.

• We provide a fully furnished apartment for burn victim's families to stay in while they are in the Burn Center sometimes for months at a time. Unfortunately this apartment is always in use. The cost for this program is $9,000.00 per year.

• We built a new "T.F.E.C. Safety Education Fire Station" located at the new "Safety Center" in Tulsa. This is a facility where we will have our Firefighter Clown Headquarters, Groups and classes can do hands on Life and Fire Safety Education programs. We started out with $30,000.00 in the year 2000, and that's about a half of what we need to finish. At this time it is used as a storage facility for our props, equipment, and safety hand out materials.

• We funded a $40,000.00 portable Safety Education home exit drill trailer with smoke machines, cameras, TV monitor, heated doors, and other items to teach about subjects like Home Hazards, Exit Drills, Kitchen Safety and much more.

• We work hand in hand with many child safety organizations in the Metro Tulsa area, and help Fire Departments across the Nation with starting safety organizations and programs like ours.

If you, your company, or organization would like to help us with any of our projects we would greatly appreciate it, we have a TFEC PowerPoint presentation CD, a TFEC Organization Slide Show D.V.D., a donation "Wish List," and would love to talk to you!

Thank you for your time in this matter!

Tom Hufford, Asst. Fire Marshal, T.F.D.
AKA Huffy the Firefighter Clown, President,
The Tulsa Firefighter's Educational Clowns