Children’s Cerebral Palsy Movement (CCPM) has been a fully committed volunteer organization for more than 6 years. Our impact has spanned the gambit from first developing a therapeutic ballet program for children with CP, to provide them joy, social opportunities and greater physical use of their bodies. This was followed by a 4-year period of providing educational resources/seminars, support groups, and experiential opportunities for CP children and their families, including 3 annual community events. These events have included a 5K & Kids Fun Run in Mission Viejo, an adaptive egg hunt, and the capstone Dare to Dream Christmas Extravaganza. Fortunately, our organization has been able to continue through the years through a constant flow of donations from small donors, business sponsorships, and our event fundraising (i.e. Event ticket sales, raffles, etc.).

Within the past year, we have seen the needs of CP children and families change and become even greater than expected…needs we cannot possibly meet exclusively through local events. On that note, we have recently pushed to provide additional programming that can be accessible by all regardless of geography!

With the timeline of the pandemic’s impact being unknown, CCPM sought to find creative avenues to financially survive and stay relevant as a resource in the CP world. Once the pandemic started and we all found ourselves in survival mode and searching for supplies like masks, hand sanitizer and even toilet paper, we found a perfect way to help. CCPM reached out to local businesses, community leaders, and used our own resources to create what we called the “CCPM Care Package”. We built, socially distanced and hand delivered these care packages directly to the doorsteps of as many CP families as possible. Since unusual resources are limited, we created an online form to properly streamline our operations based on supplies. We fulfilled requests as long as supplies lasted, and were delighted by the extraordinary responses of gratitude from the CP community.

This Care Package became the origin story for our specialty box projects; the solution to our immediate fundraising gap and our continued mission to help CP families. As such, we worked diligently to continue to source premium products to include in box kits (see projects below), which allowed us to gain revenue from sales of the boxes. The resulting boxes are high quality and used as targeted sales (tax-deductible gifts with donation) to the entire public. These sales would not only hold CCPM up, but also help underwrite the cost to provide some boxes at no cost to CP families. We also hope to implement an additional revenue source that would let businesses choose sponsorship levels to be able to essentially have ad space within our boxes. Different levels would provide deeper access to our database as well as our own external marketing efforts (social media, google ads, etc.). Ultimately, we are looking to produce a business model so we are not so reliant on donors.