Marcellus Shale

Rig Wives: The Families Who Make Up the Natural Gas Industry

The Rig Wives Foundation is a domestic non-profit working to get our 501c-3 status. We started October of 2011 as a group of woman that needed someone to understand what it takes to love the men of the Oil/Gas Industry. The official website for the Foundation is www.RigWives.org. Our motto is “Helping Oil and Gas Industry Families, One Issue at a Time”.

As women we have to be strong, self-reliant, organized, and able to do the house work, lawn work, child raising, home and vehicle repairs, medical emergencies, finances, care of any and all animals we have and anything that might and will go wrong the minute our husbands walk out the door (almost nothing breaks when the men are home). We have to do all of this while trying to never show the worry and fear that we feel while they are gone at least 6 months of the year doing a very strenuous and challenging job that could result in significant injury if anything goes wrong.  Some of the only things we can do to keep them safe in the patch is to be supportive, loving and faithful. That way they have their mind on the safety of the job and not what might be happening at home.

The Rig Wives Foundation offers the spouses a members only forum for everyday emotional  support, from advice on how to potty train a toddler to ensure intimacy continues when spouses are separated fro long periods of time. We have become a family that offers understanding, encouragement, laughter, as you will find that many of us have already been through what you are now facing.

This is where the members of Rig Wives are located.

The fund started when one of our ladies shared the worries of how to find the money needed to get her husband to work after a financial emergency.  We joined together and pooled our resources to get what they needed and a little more. As you can see we have now taken the idea to a new level none of us thought about when our sister needed help. We have helped a few families to date; here are the stories of two.

We had a lady contact us in need of funds to get her husband home in time for the scheduled C-section of their first baby. He was approved for the time off during his hitch but didn’t have the funds to get home three states away. To make a long story short he made it home to see his baby born.

The second story is one many of us have been through. A roughneck had been laid off but needed to get two states away to start with a new company without leaving his wife and kids without any money; we helped him and his family also.

We are currently collecting funds to assist a family whose oilfield worker sustained significant injuries in a vehicle accident.

The ways we raise the funds to help those that come to us is through donations and to sell oil and gas industry merchandise through the “Pushers Shack” which the Foundation gets a small profit from.

Our first fund raiser is a cookbook that is on sale now. The recipes come from the woman that live this life style. It offers over 120 recipes and is priced at $14.00, which is less than $0.13 a recipe. You can order a cookbook by going to the fundraisers page on our website. Please know that all money received will help us to hopefully stay ahead of the need we see coming to us.

The website also offers a “Working Wives” page for the women that work from home with online sales and stores. We offer this page to spouses of oil and gas industry workers free of charge. We also have an “Ask A Roughneck” page where wives can ask our anonymous roughnecks what they should do in special situations that they might want to address with their husbands, for their own peace of mind and to maybe explain something about what their spouses role is on a worksite. We try to have a well-rounded site for all to use with pages that include job hunters, testimonials, supporters, videos, pictures, poems, jokes and much more.

We hope that the future brings awareness that we are here to help and support our own.

 

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