Winner Update: Hannah’s Hope
Hannah’s Hope is a charity my wife and I started after our middle daughter, who was born with a prenatal stroke, no rhyme, no reason, just a bad deck of cards she got, passed away at the age of three. We’ve continued doing our thing raising money for kids with special needs. We’re proud to say we’ve never cut a check to a family. What we do is we have an equipment assistance program, which purchases wheelchairs, foot braces, therapy tools, iPads so kids who can’t speak can talk. We purchase that stuff for kids. We limit it to $500 per kid per year, so we don’t blow through all of our funds. We’re going … 2019 will be our 10th year. We have never had a paid employee. We were lucky enough to be the recipient of some funds Impact Club, which were greatly needed.
We have allocated nearly $40,000 for the equipment assistance program this year. We also received a $25,000 grant from Porter County Community Foundation to be used. We have used $36,000, excluding the Porter County grant, this year alone. Over 18,000 of it, so over half of it has gone to kids in Lake County. We also Porter and LaPorte County. We now have 30 kids on a waiting list for Lake County alone and it’s September and that list has been growing since July. Funds make a difference form everywhere. We are very grateful to be part of the Impact Club and what you guys have done. If you wanted to know what we do, that’s kind of what we do. I know when my wife came last year, she had mentioned to probably some of you, I was not here, we had all the intentions in the world of building a fully accessible playground for kids with special needs and of all abilities at Founders Square in Portage.
October 29 we cut the ribbon on that, a $700,000 all-inclusive playground. If you guys have a chance to get over there and take a look, please do. It’s pretty amazing and I’m not the pat my own back kind of guy, but it’s pretty something special that we’re very, very proud of. Mark and the Impact Club, we’re very happy for all the funds you got. Thank you.
