About Us
Giving a Ray of Hope is a non-profit organization led by students located in the Austin community. Our goal is to spread awareness and aid children in hospitals by providing comfort in dark times. Our organization is focused on spreading awareness through blogs, posts, donations, service projects, and more in order to help children! With many children struggling in hospitals, we hope to provide hopefulness and positivity in every way possible to lift their spirits.
Service Project
We just finished up our first service project, which was creating fun and festive coloring books for children in hospitals! It was a huge success and we are so excited to carry out more service projects in the future. While there were a number of opportunities that we could have completed for our first service project, we specifically decided to create coloring books in order to get involved with kids. Since our organization is focused on impacting children’s lives, we wanted to begin by building a connection with kids and spreading a little bit of positivity. Our aim was to provide the kids with something familiar and engaging to help brighten their holidays as much as we can. The coloring books included designs that kids can easily engage with, such as gingerbread men, Christmas trees, ornaments, and more! What's better than providing a fun and festive activity for kids to complete around the holidays?
The Process
We started off our project by having our members create their own original winter holiday-themed designs! It was a great way to really get a creative spirit in our members, and it was a big step for us to have all of our teams working towards a common collaborative goal. After we’d compiled all our designs we picked twenty of them to be featured in our coloring books. To further involve our members we had them play a part in creating the physical copies of the books as well. We had them print out their designs to create ten paged booklets, and our directors finished off the task by binding the books with string. In the end, we had an amazing turnout and were able to make over 55 books!
Donating
We were lucky enough to be able to donate these coloring books to Baylor Scott & White Medical Center. We couldn’t be more grateful to make this donation at this hospital, and they will hopefully help sprinkle some happiness in children’s lives during a time of darkness.
How this Helps Children
Going to the hospital can be a frightening experience for children. Staying at a new, unknown place can cause stress and anxiety for these children. However, giving children toys helps them ease into their alienating and unfamiliar surroundings. Our coloring books can provide a safe outlet for them to express their fears and cope with their anxiety. Coloring and art releases endorphins in their body. It has been proven to be a therapeutic practice that reduces the negative emotions of anxiety and stress. Furthermore, coloring also acts as a way to pass time. It can get boring for these kids to spend days and weeks in hospitals, but with coloring books, they have a way to spend their time in a creative way! https://www.myoccu.org/learn/giving-toys-sick-children-helps-more-you-think/2016-11-23
Conclusion
This service project would not have been a success without all of the support that we received. We want to give a huge thank you to our followers, all of our members who helped make, print and spread awareness about the project, and Rouse HOSA for contributing to our organization and service project. Our biggest thank you goes to the Baylor Scott & White Medical Center and all of the doctors and nurses that made this possible (and that are also working hard every day to help children!) We are so incredibly grateful that we were able to make this happen, and we hope to continue with more projects that can help kids in the future.
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