Doug's Love....Story of Heritage Makers

So many of you know that I am involved with a wonderful company and product called Heritage Makers. I am all about story and I want to share the story of Heritage Makers with you . The picture bellow is one of me with my dear friends Wendy Mcgee and Doug Cloward. Wendy is my executive leader in the business. Doug is the co-founder and president of Heritage Makers. This picture was taken in April at a Regional Conference in North Carolina. One week after this picture was taken Doug went to the hospital with what he thought was the flu. He ended up being diagnosed with Lymphoma.

His blog can be read at Doug's Love. He started a blog after he was diagnosed to keep his friends and family posted on his health. He has been doing a lot of sharing his life story through his blog. There is some fascinating reading! But he decided in his last post to share the HM story. I wanted to pass it along. I share Doug's vision of what Heritage Makers is all about.

This is the story of our story. It all started, really, with the creation of a concept word called storybooking, the process of creating a scrapbook with more focus on the story behind the pictures and the art, than the art itself. The new concept storybook was also to be a hard bound book, rather than a album of pages and pictures in a binder, the traditional scrapbook approach. The authors of this novel new approach to capturing important life information in a storybook were Candace May and Mother Sharon Murdoch. This was their concept and they paid dearly to develop the idea into a real product service and eventually a business called "My Family Tales". They were joined in the crusade, to launch the fledgling business, by three other equally committed people who have ownership in the birthing of the storybooking venture. They included Christine Crandall, Heidi Arave and Lisa Nelson. There were others who made contributions including Mary Strand who put financial support behind the new business. This history and the people of the storybooking concept and My Family Tales in the early 2000's set the foundations for what has become Heritage Makers. Their vision and mission statement was to "put a storybook in every home" for the purpose of creating real life heroes for the readers, usually children and the heroes were often the authors. Their ground breaking work was a vital preparatory part of the eventual creation of Heritage Makers business. From that first storybook for a beloved grandpa, a book that made him a real life hero for his posterity, we now have hundreds of thousands of storybooks, author's, heroes and children who understand, relate to and continue the legacy of their heroes, traditions, values and heritage. As we moved the storybooking concept, product, people and business into the direct selling system, we did so with the focus of using the heritage enriching power of peoples stories to the purpose, or vision, of strengthening home and family through those stories ability to capture, preserve and celebrate family heroes and heritage. In a sense the story became the means to the ulterior end, or motive, of strengthening the family and clarifying and celebrating the family heritage. We have now grown our business and extended the storybooking process to a much wider audience. With the growth has come the need to clarify the Heritage Makers message and make it more succinct and duplicable. There have been many discussions around this subject. Some of those discussions have sought to broaden the vision, mission and business concepts, but we continue to come back to the foundations of story, family and heritage. Heritage Makers is a family centric message, business and mission. So, who are we - Heritage Makers? What are we? What are we about? And how do we tell our story - clearly, concisely with a reverberating sameness that creates a resonance and conversation that can carry us into the homes and hearts of those who have not yet heard our name nor our story? For the record. Heritage Makers is about family heritage. And heritage is captured and transfered though the medium of the family's stories, even when it is about individuals' stories. In one sense we are a business of "family life publishing". We publish books about family life. In is simplest terms Heritage Makers is binding families together through the power of their own stories.