According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, there were 4,268 hospitalizations and 14,797 emergency room visits for asthma in Maricopa County in 2007. The Phoenix Children's Hospital sees approximately 3,000 youngsters each year who are suffering from asthma. Being in the hospital can be a frightening experience for a person of any age, but especially for young children. A stuffed animal can bring great comfort in this situation. Children with asthma often do not have stuffed animals because of health concerns associated with these toys. I am the right person to solve this problem because I have been doing service-learning projects with my Roots & Shoots group for five years and am now a youth leader.

Bear Hugs will bring comfort to children with asthma who are at the Phoenix Children's Hospital by giving them a teddy bear that is safe for people with asthma. The teddy bears we will donate are certified to be asthma and allergy friendly by the Asthma and Allergy Association of America. When I am raising funds for the project, I am also raising community awareness about asthma and about the way poor air quality (pollution) makes it worse and the simple things everyone can do to help reduce air pollution.

First I contacted Phoenix Children's Hospital about the number of children with asthma they see and if a donation of teddy bears would be helpful. Then I set a goal to make 100 bears to donate. Next, I contacted Build A Bear to learn more about the asthma friendly teddy bears, store discounts, and setting a date to make bears. After that I applied for a $400 mini-grant with my mom's help from the Roots & Shoots Four Corners regional office and got it. The next two steps were fundraising and volunteer recruitment. For volunteers, I contacted the Roots & Shoots regional office to find other groups in my area. I also posted on volunteermatch.org, servenet.org, and local homeschool groups. For fundraising, the Downtown Phoenix Public Market and the Thomas D. Mangelsen Images of Nature Gallery are two locations that allowed me fundraising tables, where my group members and I taught people to fold origami cranes and sold items to raise funds. I also created a ChipIn Widget online and sent out a lot of emails about that. I applied for a Furbulous Donation through the Build A Bear website. They offered a 10% discount on the bears for the project. This was not really a problem, but the store manager offered a bigger discount, which meant that I could not accept the corporate discount. I also emailed the Arizona Asthma Coalition and the Maricopa County Asthma Coalition to see how they could help. One unexpected success was that the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, the organization that certifies the bears as asthma friendly, found my project online and contacted me to offer a matching gift of another 100 teddy bears to the Phoenix Children's Hospital and 25 bears to the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Others can help by folding origami cranes to contribute, by helping make bears on October 11th, by making a donation, or by telling others about this project and sharing the ChipIn Widget that is here: http://aagresourcesforhealth.blogspot.com/. THANKS!