You Decide Who's Happy

We’ve written about it once before, but here’s another blog post to highlight our annual March Gladness competition! How it works is that we take advantage of a portion of one of our main hashtags, #everycardcounts. We ask schools across the country to join in and make uplifting, homemade cards. Then, whichever school makes the most cards that meet our guidelines gets to select the city where we reach out to for our next hospital/home/shelter!

For some background, they can’t just be any standard card. In order for them to count for this competition there are a few guidelines:

• We need to receive all the cards within the month of March, #MarchGladness
• All of the cards need to be signed with the artist’s name AND their school (e.g. from your pal, Brian at DePaul University – last year’s winner)
• If there’s a tie, then we’ll add on quality to the voting – quality and quantity

Most people would assume that whichever school wins would simply pick a hospital or home in their immediate location, but that hasn’t been the case. During the first event, the University of Michigan won and selected Philadelphia. At the time, we didn’t have any hospitals or homes there. We reached out and heard back from the shelter, Women Against Abuse, and the hospital, St Christopher. Then when DePaul University won, they selected Flint, MI, which was struggling with a water crisis and now we’re partnering with Hurley Medical Center in light of that.

As you can see, we have a pretty extensive presence across the USA -- 37 states to be exact. We still feel that needs to expand, but we’re not exactly sure where that should go. Should we reward groups who have been participating a lot and get more hospitals/shelters in their area OR should we simply work to expand to get more locations and possibly get more groups to join in since we’ll have a hospital in their area? Either way, based on our discussions with staff at the hospitals and directly watching kids open their cards, we know wherever the child is that gets your card, they’ll be more than happy. Now it’s just up to you and your classmates (or former classmates if you get an alumni association) to take control because if you guys win our March Gladness competition, YOU DECIDE WHO’S HAPPY. Please trust us when we say the families, staff, and children will be thankful you selected their city!

#youdecidewhoshappy #marchgladness #everycardcounts

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!