The 2018 Grow Clinic Party: A Holiday Highlight for COOR and Grow Clinic Families

A holiday highlight for many Church of Our Redeemer parishioners is the annual Grow Clinic party. This year, over 40 patients, including 176 family members served by the Clinic attended the party, which was held on December 14 in the Hiebert Lounge of the Boston University School of Medicine. Staff members from the Grow Clinic and Redeemer volunteers, as well as others from Boston University School of Medicine, New York Life, and Bristol Myers Squibb helped to make the party a success for the families.

Many COOR members contributed to the party. The Redeeming Knitters knitted mittens and hats all year around to donate to the Mitten Tree. Sixteen members of the Youth Group and Rite-13 shopped in advance for toys for guests’ gift bags. Dozens baked and decorated cookies to accommodate all allergies and donated hats, mittens, gloves, blankets, scarves, and children’s books. Co-organized by Chris Needham and Bill Vogele, over twenty Redeemer volunteers served food, assisted kids with crafts, took family photographs and photos with Santa, and helped attendees make selections from the Mitten Tree. Redeemer’s own band entertained party goers with live holiday music, followed by a fun karaoke sing-along!

Dr. Deborah A. Frank, Founder and Director of the Grow Clinic, wrote, “I really don’t have words to let you know how grateful we are for the wonderful party you made happen for our patients and their families. I am glad you got to see in real time how much joy your kindness spread from the cookies to the crafts to the band!  The presents, too, were phenomenal – staff said they had never seen so many appropriate and well-chosen ones. I am sure you saw that many children left sporting their gorgeous new knit hats. You have brought great literal and figurative warmth into many all too bleak young lives. It is on their behalf that we thank you and send warmest wishes to you all for a happy and healthy 2019!”

The Grow Clinic for Children, founded in 1984, is an outpatient, sub-specialty clinic at the Boston Medical Center that provides medical, nutritional, developmental and social services to families of babies and children in the Greater Boston area for who suffer from failure to thrive (FTT) from malnutrition, illness, and family stress. For more information on the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center, see: https://development.bmc.org/about-us/what-we-do/grow-clinic-children/.