It Starts With Us: Every Gift Makes a Difference
As a team member at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, your hard work and dedication have helped create a special place of healing and hope. Through the It Starts With Us Employee Giving Campaign you can support patients and their families in another meaningful way. Together, we can amplify our impact for the children and families in our care.
Your Gift Today Makes a Difference for Kids
Every day we give our time, our hearts, and our expertise—and now, we donate. Why? Because supporting our patients starts with us.
Your gift will help ease the burden of hospitalization on families and fuel programs like Child Life, Family Guidance and Bereavement, and Art and Music Therapy, as well as power innovative maternal and child health research at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Every donor to the It Starts With Us Employee Giving Campaign will receive a special badge pin to represent their participation in this year's campaign.
“Five years from now, 10 years from now, 50 years from now, those memories of when everyone here worked so hard to carve out a beautiful moment for a little young family, those are the moments I will cling to when I remember what had been a very scary experience.”
– Collette, Austen’s mom
Austen's Story: Care Team Members Give Hope to a Young Family
The news crashed like waves over 72 hours for Collette and Alex.
Monday morning: Collette gave birth to Austen, a premature baby girl weighing just 2.6 pounds.
Tuesday afternoon: They found out Austen needed surgery to address a tracheoesophageal fistula.
Wednesday morning: Austen was then diagnosed with a very serious heart condition called Tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia.
But, from the moment Alex and Collette stepped foot into Packard Children's Hospital, it was clear that the care team operated on a different level:
- After Austen was intubated, nurses made sure Collette could hold tiny Austen. It was the first time she got to experience that as a mother.
- When a nurse asked Collette, “What do you need?” and Collette responded that she wasn't the patient, the nurse said, “No, we treat the entire family.”
- After Austen underwent her first open-heart surgery, her postoperative recovery was uneventful (in a good way!). It’s a testament to the multidisciplinary team of neonatologists, cardiologists, intensivists, and surgeons who worked together to support Austen.