Beneficiaries: Children & Families
Any Baby Can:
Any Baby Can Child and Family Resource Center has served Austin/Travis County and its surrounding communities since 1979 as a premiere, comprehensive family service organization. Any Baby Can’s mission is to ensure that all children reach their potential through education, therapy, and family support services. Each year, Any Baby Can brings help and hope to more than 6,000 of Austin’s youngest, sickest, and poorest children.
Austin Sunshine Camps:
The Austin Sunshine Camps are owned and operated by the Young Men’s Business League of Austin. Founded in 1928, the Camps seek to teach life skills, self confidence, trust and teamwork, while providing outdoor fun through traditional activities like hiking, swimming, canoeing, and sports. The Austin Sunshine Camps serves over 800 high-potential, low-income youth every summer, and their year-round leadership and mentoring programs serve many more. The Camps provide an overnight summer camp experience at NO COST to the children’s families.
Camp John Marc:
Special Camps for Special Kids serves children with chronic illnesses and major physical disabilities, and the families of those children, by making possible high-quality, year-round camping experiences at Camp John Marc, a unique camp facility in Bosque County, Texas. At Camp John Marc, Special Camps for Special Kids provides cooperative programming with the health organizations, community volunteers, and pediatric hospitals also dedicated to serving these children. Camp John Marc serves children, primarily from the Dallas/Fort Worth area, with a variety of special medical needs or major physical disabilities. Each session at camp is dedicated to a particular diagnosis and campers are chosen through partnering groups and organizations. Camp John Marc primarily partners with groups affiliated with Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, Texas Scottish Rite Hospital of Dallas and Cook Children’s Medical Center of Fort Worth. Camp John Marc utilizes community and medical volunteers to provide program support and quality medical care and treatment in the camp setting.
Clayton Dabney Foundation:
The Clayton Dabney Foundation for Kids with Cancer provides needy families, with children in the last stages of terminal cancer, assistance in creating everlasting memories. The assistance is arranged through the parents and is anonymous to the child. Medicine of the Heart, the primary outreach program, has helped over 1,200 families and distributed over $2 million in last wishes, gifts and financial assistance to terminally ill children and their needy families across the United States.
Cancer is a devastating disease that strikes children indiscriminately, leaving families emotionally and financially exhausted. The Clayton Dabney Foundation can help ease these burdens and help provide much needed life-long memories.
Peaceable Kingdom – Out on a Limb Camp
Peaceable Kingdom serves 6,000+ children with chronic illnesses and special needs between the ages of 3 and 22, along with their families annually. These children come free of charge and without regard to race, religion or ability to pay. The retreat serves children whose abilities and disabilities vary. Some are very verbal, social, and independent; others are non-verbal, non-ambulatory and/or incontinent. In spite of their differences, they share a common love for fun and friendships.
Presbyterian Children’s Homes & Services:
Since its beginnings in 1903 as an orphanage in Dallas, Presbyterian Children’s Homes and Services has been providing residential care and other services to children and families with no place else to turn. Whether it’s through one of our group homes, a foster home, our Child and Family Program, or the Advanced Education and Aftercare Program, we do all we can to help show the children in our care that they are beloved children of God.
Rise School of Dallas:
The purpose of the Rise School of Dallas is to provide the highest quality of early childhood education services to children with Down syndrome or other developmental disabilities and to children without disabilities by:
- Providing exemplary services based on recommended practices to young children with diverse abilities and their families;
- Offering instructional opportunities through collaboration with various academic programs at local colleges and universities;
- Engaging in research that positively influences practice in the field of early childhood education at the local, state and national levels;
- Interfacing with the community through outreach and public awareness activities;
- Disseminating information and providing technical assistance to other community based agencies and affecting policy and systems change at the local, state and national levels.
Ronald McDonald House of Dallas
The Ronald McDonald House of Dallas is a temporary home-away-from-home that serves and sustains families of seriously ill or injured children receiving treatment in a Dallas hospital. Ronald McDonald House of Dallas opened its doors in 1981 with a capacity to serve 10 families. Today it has grown to serve 60 families nightly. In 2008, they provided for 9,855 nightly visits in their rooms and 690 nights lodging in their apartments.
The Ronald McDonald House of Dallas has experienced increasing demand for its services and therefore just finished a new 60,000 square foot Ronald McDonald House in the Southwestern Medical District ½ mile from Children’s Medical Center and 1 ½ miles from Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children; the two largest referring hospitals to the Ronald McDonald House. The new Ronald McDonald House can serve 60 families nightly.
Scottish Rite Hospital:
Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children (TSRHC) is a world leader in the treatment of pediatric orthopedic conditions. They strive to improve the care of children worldwide through innovative research and teaching programs, training physicians from around the world. TSRHC treats Texas children with orthopedic conditions, such as scoliosis, clubfoot, hand disorders, hip disorders and limb length differences, as well as certain related neurological disorders and learning disorders, such as dyslexia.
As a leading pediatric orthopedic center, the hospital has treated more than 190,000 children since its inception, with more than 40,000 clinic visits each year. The hospital takes a multidisciplinary approach to care, tailoring treatment to the individual needs of each child and family. All services are provided without charge to patient families.
Snowball Express:
Snowball Express is the charity for the children of our fallen military heroes. They started in 2006 with a simple idea: Provide hope and new memories to the children of our fallen military heroes who died while on active duty since September 11, 2001.
By attending Snowball Express a child can see that “service above self” is honored by others and is a value they should subscribe to as they continue to mature as adults. They also realize they can honor their fallen hero in ways other than by being sad or at a somber place. Snowball Express gives them a piece of their childhood back, allowing them to have fun and realize it’s OK to laugh.
Wonders & Worries:
Wonders & Worries helps children and their families cope when a parent or caregiver has a chronic or life-threatening illness. Our professional services are always provided free of charge, and are available in English and Spanish. Our vision of the future is a world where all children and their families have the tools and support they need to emerge from a family health crisis stronger than they were before.