Give a Day Get a Disney Day

Posted by Gabe on February 8, 2010 under Kids are Heroes | 2 Comments to Read

You may know that we recently featured Dylan Mahalingam on the Kids Are Heroes web site. Dylan and his family are involved in so many amazing things, it’s indeed mind-boggling. I had the pleasure of speaking to Dylan’s mom at length recently and among other things she brought up this “Give a Day Get a Day” concept. It turns out that Dylan’s organization, Lil’ MDGs, is one of the organizations that validates the volunteers for this project. What Disney is offering is that if you volunteer a day of service, you are entitled to a free day at one of their parks. We were asked if we would like to host one of these events.

Now at first I thought I would listen, be polite and just say ‘no’ to this request as we have so many things on our plate already. But after hearing more about it I felt it made the utmost sense for Kids Are Heroes to host at least one of these events. After all, despite the “reward” at the end, it still promotes volunteering and giving among family members.

So we mustered up the idea of inviting participants to a large store near us where families could “build” stuffed animals and donate them to sick and/or disadvantaged children.  We are calling it a “Boyd’s Bear Drive”, where families come out to Boyd’s Bear Country in Gettysburg, PA, get someone (a family member or friend) to donate a bear to them so they can build it for someone else.  We imagined the children methodically choosing just the right animal with just the right clothing to please a sick or needy child somewhere.  What’s nice about the Boyd’s Bears facility is that it is HUGE and can accommodate quite a few people at the same time.  Besides stuffing bears, the volunteers will write letters and draw pictures to include with the bear so that the recipients will get a better sense of who donated the bears to them.  The target locations for these bears are Children’s Medical Center in Washington DC, Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, and the Nyaka school for orphans in Uganda.

It is of paramount importance to us that this goes smoothly for everyone so we are doing a ‘test run’ as it were on Saturday, March 6th from 12PM-2PM where we will max out at 50 people.  Our main event will then be on Saturday, April 10 where we hope to host as many as 400 people!  WOW!! That’s a lot of Disney tickets! UPDATE 3/8/10: Read my blog post on the first event.

UPDATE: As of 3/9/10 Disney has indeed reached its quota of 1 million vouchers.  There will be no more opportunities for free tickets provided by Disney.  If you would like to participate without getting a Disney ticket, please contact us directly.