Hospital Art for Kids

About Hospital Art for Kids

What we do…
Hospital Art for Kids (HAFK) is a program designed to help children in hospitals and clinics to deal with the pain, suffering, isolation and loneliness that often accompany prolonged hospitalization. By providing unique blank drawings and coloring sets for the children, the program seeks to offer them a little hope and comfort. HAFK provides 'kits' to hospitals to facilitate the program. Each HAFK coloring kit contains 100 copies each of 20 different unique designs (a total of 2,000 copies), a multipack of 216 watercolor pens to be distributed in sets of 16, and a complete instruction set, all organized in a file case to facilitate distribution of the materials to the children. Currently our costs are $250 per kit.

Why we do it…
HAFK was started by Richard Stocker, long-time artist and social activist, who, confronted with his own son’s terminal illness, was impelled to help other children and their parents deal with the strange and sometimes hard-to-understand hospital environment, and with the often bewildering world of medicine and health-care workers. Convinced that coloring had considerable therapeutic value, Richard brought in many of his unique designs along with some coloring implements to distribute to children and their parents in order to soften the unfamiliar with the more familiar, to bring people closer together, facilitate communication and offer relief in a stressful situation.

What we want to do further…
This program has worked extremely well. On a local level, HAFK has been able to provide the materials to make a lot of children happy – and their parents as well. The many positive testimonials and endorsement from the medical community lead us to believe that the program should be greatly expanded. And this is what we want to do. As an established non-profit organization, HAFK now seeks to bring its successful coloring programs first to children throughout Northern New Mexico, next to children throughout the state and, ultimately to as many states as funding will allow. Currently we are working with Presbyterian Hospital and UNM Hospital. It take money, personnel and time to produce the coloring books, purchase the pens, assemble and distribute the kits. Our current cost is $250 per 2,000 copy kit. In New Mexico and the immediately surrounding area there are approximately 220 hospitals. To place just one kit in each would cost $55,000. Considering that larger hospitals will need 3-5 additional kits per year, our projected costs approach $100,000. We anticipate that as production increases, our cost per kit will drop to about $150. Rather than reducing our budget to reflect those savings, we see an opportunity to broaden the project, an opportunity to introduce the program into nursing homes and other facilities where we believe that the healing power of coloring and crating art can make a difference. Indeed, this program has the potential to brighten the lives of those in prisons, trauma centers, rehab centers, mental health facilities and other care facilities. HAFK is relatively new and still small and it is becoming evident that the organization must now change in order to realize these expanded goals. It will be important to create a volunteer organization with a strong Board of Directors dedicated to improving lives through art. We envision an organization in which 90% of donations and funding go directly to producing and distributing the materials with minimal administrative costs. Individual donations are but a portion of the funding we seek. In order to optimize our effectiveness it is important that we create grant/trust/tribute/estate planning avenues and other means of fundraising. We have the vision, drive, skills and connections to make this a successful program. We just need the funding to bring it about. Richard Stocker, January, 2006.