The nonprofit has an opportunity to tell the story of how the organization adapted to tremendous external changes in the last year.
To deliver our HopeDay and HopeCommunity programs of ongoing events, we work directly with hundreds of event partners across the country such as movie theaters, professional sporting teams, live theater, amusement parks, waterparks, zoos, so many more venues that provide fun events and family entertainment. Within two weeks of COVID-19 affecting America, 100% of our event partners were shut down. As a result we were left with no programming events to provide the families that we serve.
We immediately worked on building a new virtual program, often creatively leveraging our existing network of event partners and volunteers, to provide fun and engaging events via Zoom. Some of the new virtual events we created were book clubs for parents and teens, storytime with Disney Princesses, meet and greets with professional athletes, crafts, movie watch parties, cooking classes, virtual museum tours, in-home scavenger hunts, dance classes, magic shows and so much more. This new virtual program proved very popular, fun, engaging and vital during such a challenging time for everyone.
We realized quickly that delivering a program of virtual events had benefits far beyond a pandemic and that it shouldn’t have taken COVID-19 for us to realize this. We serve families that have a child with a life-threatening medical condition, and they are often isolated, especially over the winter, as a result of their child’s condition. They can spend weeks and months in the hospital. We also have families that cannot participate as frequently as they would like in our in-person program due to their location. Through our virtual program we were able to bring a new program directly to them no matter where they were located. For the first time, we were able to bring together HopeKids families from our various chapters across the country. As a result of the success of our virtual program we will be hiring a staff member to continue to provide virtual events as part of our regular programming.