A veritable menagerie of very special Teddy Bears arrived at Spectrum Health Lakeland today much to the delight of Lakeland’s Pediatric and Emergency Room teams who welcomed the hundreds of new arrivals with open arms and hugs all around in Michigan’s Great Southwest.
Delivery day is always magnetic when Mike Daigle and his crew arrive on the doorstep with huge loads of Teddy Bears of seemingly every single shape, color and size to brighten the sometimes frightening experience of a child’s first time visit to the hospital for whatever medical reason. Today was no exception as nurses and doctors stopped by a fireside Christmas tree in the visitor’s lobby at Spectrum Health Lakeland in St. Joe.
Mike Daigle, South Bend International Airport CEO and Executive Director, made one of his five hospital stops today in St. Joseph and heralded the 2018 Bears in the Air program, “A tremendous success.” He added, “Our goal was 2,000 Teddy Bears and we reached 2,119 due to the generosity of so many corporations and individuals who made donations allowing us to exceed our goal.” This marks the 7th Annual Bears in the Air campaign, which was launched on November 30th at South Bend International.
Daigle said this morning, “We’re donating to five local area hospitals and Spectrum Health Lakeland is just one of them. We’re happy to do that.” The generosity of residents of the region, guests, and travelers through the airport is record-setting once again, as Daigle says, “It’s amazing to try to help a community one person at a time, one child at a time, and that’s really what this program is about. It’s about trying to make where we live as good as it can be, and the best that it can be. We do that.”
The common phrase you hear all the time is “paying it forward,” and Daigle says if you want to look at it that way, that’s what it is. But, he notes, “It’s really trying to make a person’s life a little bit better, as we can only imagine what it’s like to be a child in the hospital and be a little scared about what’s going on. The thing we’ve heard over the years of doing this each year, is that the medical staff loves it because it helps them do their job better. It gives the child something to focus on so the doctors and nurses can focus on helping that child.”
Asked if they ratchet up the goal for 2019, Daigle says, “We’re going to have a conversation about what we think next year’s goal is going to be as we sit down in the next couple of months and start to get ready for June or July when we start planning this all over again, so it wouldn’t surprise me to set a goal that’s even higher.”
The delivery today at Spectrum Health Lakeland was just one stop for Daigle and his team. Bears were also distributed yesterday to Beacon Children’s Hospital in South Bend, Saint Joseph Health System in Mishawaka, and Elkhart General Hospital in Elkhart. Following today’s drop at Spectrum Health Lakeland, Daigle and company headed to the Plymouth Medical Center in Plymouth, Indiana for their final stop on the Bears in the Air delivery tour for this year.
While this is the seventh year at South Bend International Airport, Daigle says, “We actually started this in 1997 at an airport in Wisconsin, and we’ve been doing it so long now that we’ve come up with an estimate that we’ve gotten over 35,000 Teddy Bears that have been given over the years to do this, so again we’re just trying to make our community the best place it can be.”
In addition to Teddy Bears donated to local hospitals, the Bears in the Air campaign produces a cash donation annually to the Robert L. Miller, Sr. Veteran’s Center which will take place in January.
