More Powerful Smiles

“Use both hands,” nurses and staff urge a young patient with a bandaged hand. They encourage him to do so during all of his daily activities, ranging from drinking juice to eating some snacks. The one time they DON’T need to encourage him though is when he’s playing video games!

Two key themes that we strive to uphold are that every card counts AND to make sure that there’s no such thing as a pediatric department that’s too small. In regards to the first point, we’ve discussed it many times before, but one of the reasons we use #everycardcounts is that we believe each card is important because every place we partner with promises they’ll deliver all the cards room to room. As for the too-small aspect, we’ve professed our love for some large hospitals, but we strive to partner with hospitals that often get overlooked. With us, we can send a package any size to anywhere!

Thanks to you, we’ve been growing and have been able to do a bit more than simply provide cards for the kids we cherish. On February 1^st and 2^nd, we delivered our first GO Karts to hospitals in Phoenix, AZ and Providence, RI. Delivery to our hospital in Augusta, GA is coming soon. Here are a couple more pictures from those deliveries:

During the delivery to Maricopa Integrated Health System (MIHS) in Arizona, the staff were telling us how the kids are all so excited when they receive our cards. They mentioned how the two main hospitals in the area primarily get all of the donations for pediatric patients, and since they’re smaller and often work with patients and families without insurance, they get less donations. We’re working to change that! We believe there’s no such thing as a hospital that’s too small, #nosuchthing.

For some more background, since everyone at Cardz for Kidz! volunteers their “free” time, we can primarily focus our donations on rewarding hospitals. How it works is that we always ask hospitals to send us pictures of children, family and/or staff with their cards to ensure we still have the right contacts and so we know that all the cards are still being delivered room to room, #everycardcounts. Thankfully MIHS has been sending pictures each quarter. In addition, UBS has donated over $4,000 and 2000+ cards (2,029 to be exact) to our organization, so in order to thank both groups we donated a GO Kart to MIHS in UBS’s name.

These GO Karts align with our passion of making sure that kids who are confined to their rooms can still feel uplifted.

In conclusion, thanks to your contributions we have been able to consistently grow and deliver MORE POWERFUL SMILES to all types of people impacted by children’s stays in the hospital. Together we’ll keep uplifting spirits!

To see more pictures and stories, please check out our website www.cardzforkidz.org; like us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter and Instagram; visit our Google+ or LinkedIn pages! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!