Number of Participants: 5
Hours Donated: 50
Value of Time Served: $2,113
Event Type: Children & Youth
Sport: Team
Date: October 16, 2020
Location:
Levittown
NY, USA
About:
Four seniors from Division Avenue High School in the Levittown Public Schools, along with a junior from Hicksville High School, recently started Patterns for Patients, a small non-profit organization that sends care packages filled with handmade bracelets, toys, stickers and masks (if allowed) to pediatric hospitals.
Striving to spread joy, Tarangini Arunachalam, Mahek Mody, Rhythm Osan and Vicky Zhang from Division Avenue High School and Jason Jiang from Hicksville High School have made it their mission to donate care packages to as many hospitals as possible. Thus far, they have already donated a total of 125 individually wrapped bracelets to St. Luke’s in Boise, ID, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital in Buffalo, NY.
To help raise funds for their care packages, the five students have been creating and selling bracelets, as well as accepting donations. During October, the group is working on a special Breast Cancer Awareness project where they are selling bracelets to raise awareness with all of the proceeds supporting the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The idea to start the non-profit was sparked from downtime during the pandemic.
“Over quarantine, my friends and I decided to take up learning how to make friendship bracelets to pass time,” said Arunachalam. “Soon enough, we had dozens of bracelets with no real purpose for them. We thought it would be nice to donate them to some pediatric hospitals and then it evolved into Patterns for Patients!”
Photo captions:
1) Division Avenue students Vicky Zhang (left), Tarangini Arunachalam (second from right) and Rhythm Osan (right) and Hicksville High School student Jason Jiang are part of Patterns for Patients, a non-profit organization that sells and donates handmade bracelets to pediatric patients. (Not pictured: Mahek Mody)
2) Division Avenue students Vicky Zhang (left) and Rhythm Osan created custom bracelets to include in a care package for a hospital.
Photos courtesy of the Levittown Public Schools
