The Brutal Truth About What Families Face When a Child Gets Sick in BC

One thing I know when we got involved with Ronald McDonald House, Um, a lot of people ask me, you know, with the, with the dream rally supporting RMHBC Yukon, they said to me, you know, why are you supporting a Vancouver charity? Yeah.

And that to me was that switch that was like, I need to support, I need to bring, um, the community around and have them understand exactly what the house does.

How hard has that been to kind of get out into communities? Because it is, it's serving the communities where we live, communities all the way up into the Yukon, all over British Columbia.

How difficult is that to kind of get donors and get people

involved that way? It's been really challenging.

One of the concepts, of course, is that the house is in Vancouver.

So, you know, who does it serve? Well, we don't serve families from Vancouver because ultimately they could stay at home.

Even if it's across the bridge, it's still a long way to go when your child is seriously ill.

But we had to draw some parameters around it.

But the province is really has been a challenge for us to tell that story because we serve everyone outside the lower mainland, 50 or more kilometers outside.

And so a third of the population comes from the interior of BC, a third from the island, and a third from North and Yukon.

And yet still, most of our fundraising comes from the Lower Mainland.

That's because most of the staff are there.

So as we've been growing in these last couple of years and being able to have a family room in Prince George, a family room in Kamloops, one in Surrey, then we're starting to get further out into the communities and be able to have those connections.

And then, of course, the Dream Rally.

And the work that you do is phenomenal because it gives us an opportunity to talk more about the services that we provide to the families from this area.