19 Mar COVID-19 Update: How You Can Help Families

Posted at 12:03h in News by

Please continue reading for an update on how we are serving families and how you can help us continue to provide essential services during this health crisis.

Ronald McDonald Houses

Each of our Kansas City Ronald McDonald Houses are open and continue to keep families together. We are working closely with our hospital partners to ensure a safe and sanitary environment that protects the health of families, employees, volunteers, visitors, or others to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 in our community and beyond. Throughout the last four months, we placed NEW families in hotels and are trying to continue to provide them love and care while still operating our three Houses with the families occupying them. Starting in July, we’ve brought more families back into our Houses and currently are at 50% capacity. We will remain at that capacity at this stage, as COVID-19 cases are on the rise in Kansas and Missouri.

Volunteer Program

We have made the decision to suspend all volunteerism until further notice. However, we have creatively adapted our meal group volunteer opportunities. While we continue to service families with critically, high-risk, hospitalized children there are three NEW ways to help:
  1. Sponsoring a curbside meal: collect funds to send individually packaged meals to families catered from area restaurants. Contact [email protected] for more information.
  2. Collect and mail restaurant gift cards: Subway, McDonalds, Papa Johns and Jimmy Johns are all quick options nearby Children’s Mercy.
  3. Ship individually packaged shelf-stable items: individually packaged granola bars, easy mac, ramen noodles, smuckers sandwiches, fruit snacks and more help to nourish families on the go.

How You Can Help

1. Make a Financial Gift: We will use these donations to help families who are staying in our Houses and our hotel partners. It costs $100 to keep a family overnight. Please consider gifting a family the ability to stay for a night, a week or a month. Thus far we have incurred over $300,000 in unbudgeted expenses.

Make a Gift Today

2. Sponsor a curbside meal: collect funds to send individually packaged meals, gift cards or shelf-stable items to guest families. Contact [email protected] for more information.

3. Give a gift for later: Creating a legacy gift is a powerful way to support families forever, without paying anything today. We have a free online tool to help you write a will, protect what matters most, and support our work forever in 25 minutes or less.

4. Send our families your love: Please, keep them in your thoughts. Can you imagine?  Already the scariest thing has happened – you need to be at a Ronald McDonald House because your baby was born early, your toddler has cancer, your teenager needs a transplant … and now you have to navigate it during a global pandemic?

For them, we persevere. We are only here because of your goodwill, and we’ll continue to do this work because of your love for the families we serve.

While we do not yet know how long these changes will remain in effect, we will continue to evaluate the impact of the situation on our organization as the health and safety of our families, employees and volunteers remains our top priority.

As a reminder, the most up-to-date information about COVID-19 is available from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

We are incredibly grateful for your support which will help families focus on what’s most important: their children.