Parenting Special Needs Children blog proudly announces the addition of a category: Resource Tuesday. In this category we will profile an organization (business or non-profit) that provides resources special needs children and their families, or adoptive and foster children and their families. We hope that this will provide an active resource list for parents seeking information, but also provide some ideas of how you can “give back” through volunteer and donor involvement with any of these organizations.

A Leg Up for Kids Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to the idea that special needs children need to have mobility. They provide specially equipped wheelchairs or strollers to children on ventilators.

The Foundation identifies critically ill children whose families don’t have the financial means of purchasing the needed mobility equipment for their children. They distribute this equipment through the A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Delaware and Children's Hospitals of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

Since their founding in 1999, A Leg Up for Kids Foundation has equipped about 300 families with the chance to mobilize their child on a mechanical ventilator. This freedom for the family is tremendous. The benefits for the child are a chance to interact with the world and other people, not to mention all the sensory stimulation a child receives by traveling to stores, the park, church and other places. The family can now safely transport their child wherever he/she needs to go. No more expensive (and sometimes scary for the child) ambulance transports just to go for doctor visits.

Not surprising, the stroller was designed by a dad with an engineering background, and he is now the co-founder of this organization. Mark Nickerson, along with Cynthia Baldacchini, run the foundation with a cadre of parents, doctors and other health professionals as volunteers.

Knowing a couple in our church who foster medically fragile children, I have come to understand both the difficulty and the necessity to be able to safely give a child mobility, regardless of their disability. It is a daunting task. But the child must have a chance at the developmental activities that come from being able to get where you need to go and experience the sensory stimulation of the world around us. And the parents need a shot at a bit of normalcy in their lives as well (like a simple trip to the grocery store).

Bravo to the folks at A Leg Up for Kids Foundation for seeing a need and meeting it.

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