What's Your Why? Volunteer Spotlight on Isabella Heinbaugh-McCroskey and Donna Heinbaugh


“We met an absolutely amazing young lady and her mother in Ohio, Fred Thompson shared. “You should reach out to her for her story.” That very recommendation from one of Wreaths Across America’s driving ambassadors for the Mobile Education Exhibit started this story. It’s how we roll.

Isabella Heinbaugh-McCroskey will start high school in the Fall, but she’s already accumulated invaluable experience in research, history, record-keeping, mapping, public speaking, critical problem-solving, and more. Her experiences with Wreaths Across America provide her with an opportunity to serve her community and unite people in a common cause to remember, honor, and teach. “I feel like some of the younger generations don’t exactly know how much the veterans did for us because we don’t learn about it too much in school,” Isabella responded when asked why it was essential to teach. “The veterans who gave their lives for us should be honored as they should have been from the moment they enlisted. Younger people need to understand what they did to keep us free. So many just think, ‘oh, yeah, this was free,’ but they take everything for granted and don’t really understand what our veterans did for us.”

Isabella’s introduction to Wreaths Across America was through her mom, Donna Heinbaugh. “Back in 2016, our Girl Scout troop started placing wreaths at the national cemetery here in Rittman, Ohio,” Donna shared. “During the COVID lockdown, we got to thinking about Isabella’s Silver Award requirements for Girl Scouts, and this is what she came up with.” Isabella and her mom had seen the Mobile Education Exhibit in 2020, and now she wanted to host it in her town. After getting fast approval from her City Manager, a U.S. Army veteran, Isabella filled out the request form.

Much to their surprise, at that time, the Mobile Education Exhibit was available and already planning to be in Ohio, so Isabella’s request was approved quickly, and they only had a short amount of time to prepare for and announce the arrival of the unit to their community. They were on it with just a few weeks to get ready. “We had honestly thought it would be sometime later in the summer,” Donna admitted. “But we made it work. Fred and Diane were just the nicest people to work with, and we had a great time.”

Isabella says they got to work. “First, we had to find a place to put it [MEE]! Once we did that, we got together with our Liaison and talked about what we’d do and what we needed.” They worked on inviting a who’s-who list in the community and made sure to ask a couple of news reporters too. They welcomed just shy of a hundred people to check out the Mobile Education Exhibit earlier this year. That was the icing on the cake.

A lot of Isabella’s involvement with Wreaths Across America has been in preparing for Wreath Day, and that volunteer effort has proved quite educational for them and their community. “We had a roster of names, and we had to find them in the cemetery. We got information and maps from the city,” Isabella explains the process of locating veterans to receive a veteran’s wreath. Interestingly, during their search, they discovered the city records were not entirely accurate, and through the process, Isabella and her mom identified more veterans laid to rest.

As many of our volunteers tell us, one thing leads to the next, and that’s undoubtedly the case for Isabella and Donna.“Our city actually has three small cemeteries,” Donna explains. “We started out with the largest of the three, with one hundred and eighty-five veterans, but we have two more. We’re told each of them has about thirty veterans buried there, so our hopes are to do more research this summer.”

If you'd like to support their efforts you can check out their sponsorship page here.

You can hear more from Isabella and Donna’s What’s Your Why interview on Wreaths Across America Radio.