Patches of Light helps families of ill children with expenses
On the January night that Megan and Brandon Moore arrived home exhausted from Nationwide Children’s Hospital, their house felt as frigid inside as the below-zero temperature outside.
With their 17-month-old son being treated at the hospital for high-risk neuroblastoma — a rare cancer most often found in infants — the couple was teetering financially, unable to afford the $600 needed to refill the propane tank to heat their Newark home.
Megan Moore immediately called the social worker assigned to the family at Nationwide Children’s, and Faye Bullio recommended contacting Patches of Light, a Columbus-area nonprofit that helps cover emergency expenses for families of sick children.
Within 24 hours, the propane tank was refilled.
“It means so much to us,” Moore said. “I remember the panic I had when I saw how low our propane tank was.”
That sense of relief is what Mindy Atwood was hoping to provide when she founded Patches of Light 20 years ago.
She knows firsthand how difficult it can be to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked while coping with a family illness that leads to prohibitive medical bills.
In 1983, she and her husband, Rodney, learned that one of her four sons — Jason, a twin — had Wilms tumor, a childhood kidney cancer.
Although her husband was working two jobs, they couldn’t keep up with household expenses and the power to their home was shut off. Owing more than $65,000 in medical bills, the couple was forced to declare bankruptcy. About a decade later, the Moores’ youngest son, Michael, faced unexpected open-heart surgery to correct a congenital defect in 1992. The procedure left the couple with unpaid medical bills totaling $25,000 — which, Atwood said, “didn’t seem like anything” compared with the earlier hospital bills.
She and her husband were too embarrassed to ask for help, she said, and, in the pre-internet days, the pool of people to ask was limited.
“We didn’t have social media,” said Atwood, 60, of Hilliard. “When you had your electricity shut off, you had to go out on your own with a sick child trying to find someone to help you.”
After both sons recovered, the Atwoods began helping other families with similar short-term financial needs as best they could.
In December 1999, Mindy Atwood hosted a candy sale and raised $500, which she donated to Nationwide Children’s. She asked that the money be used to cover rent, groceries and utilities for struggling families, but hospital officials said they couldn’t earmark donations that way.
So Atwood formed her own nonprofit.
Patches of Light works through the recommendations of social workers who are assigned by hospitals to families with a child fighting a serious illness.
In times of extreme need, families fill out an online application for help with a late rent or mortgage payment, a utility bill or groceries. Atwood reviews the paperwork and distributes the money within a week to 10 days. Rent checks go directly to landlords or mortgage companies, and she sends families gift cards to grocery stores or gas stations near their homes.
Bullio, a clinical social worker at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and one of 13 volunteers on the Patches of Light board of directors, knows the importance of emergency assistance.
“Many families will lose their job, lose their income — and that social safety net is precarious for many people,” she said.
Rarely does Atwood meet the recipients. “That’s the last thing they need — feeling like they have to thank someone for help,” she said.
To generate the money she doles out, Atwood organizes a variety of fundraisers, many of them at festivals.
In 2017, she said, Patches of Light covered bills for 129 families, including some for auto repairs, utilities and stays at the Ronald McDonald House, which lodges out-of-town families whose children are being treated at Nationwide Children’s.
Atwood estimated the nonprofit has so far provided more than $1 million in assistance.