Cards For Hospitalized Kids

Location: AEP Energy

Date: Thursday, December 18 and Friday, December 19 2014

Last year a simple idea had achieved two-fold outcome.  It had yielded hundreds of cards to cheer up kids spending their holidays in a hospital and it had energized my office colleagues into doing something as a team.  Since then we had done a couple of other initiatives, including putting together “care packages” for our troops.  But this program was not on our agenda for this year and so we had not done any preparations.  At our holiday luncheon on Wednesday, one of my colleagues asked if we were doing it again this year.  I asked around and there was general enthusiasm all around.  So I went to the other members of the crew and we said why not. 

The problem was that while we could make as many cards as we liked, we had no place to send them, since we were past the ‘Cards For Hospitalized Kids'’ mailing date for Christmas.  I thought about contacting Dr. Schmidt, whom I had met at UIC Children’s Hospital, ‘Festival of Thanksgiving’, or even Make-A-Wish.  Then someone suggested that while we were late for Christmas, how about we make ‘New Year’s’ cards and mail it to ‘Cards For Hospitalized Kids’.  That sounded like a great idea and we decided to go with it.  We sent out a company-wide email to announce that over lunch break on the next two days, we would be placing card-making supplies in the big conference room and everyone was welcome to participate.  Well, there was still a matter of the supplies though.

The supplies

I had some supplies left over from last year’s endeavor, but not enough.  So that evening I took a trip to ‘Michael's’ to look for things like card stock paper, pens, stickers etc.  I took them to office the next day and set up the room with the supplies.  And only person came.  Well, it was a late notice but I thought that if people wanted to participate, they would find a way.  But we still had one card and that would make a difference to at least one child.  That was worth the trip for shopping last night.

On Friday I was at my desk and a few of my colleagues came over and asked for supplies.  It did look like we were making progress.  They even set up the room while I ran some errands.  There was another program scheduled for that afternoon – ‘Holiday Cookie Exchange’ and people who came for that, stayed back to make some cards.  In fact, that opened up the floodgates and soon we had a huge crowd in there. The program was a big success. 

And the outcome

I came back in the evening and the team had made over 60 cards.  And like last year, we had some outstanding designs.  I packed the cards in a box and shipped it with a note saying “AEP Energy wishes the kids a Happy New Year’.  A few days later I received a letter from them they appreciated our cards and for bringing joy to the kids this New Year’s.  It had started with a comment asking if we were doing this program and had led to the team responding splendidly once again.  It was a great end to the season.