Helping Kids

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We are fortunate to live in an area with tremendous resources for helping health challenged kids. Close to us are Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford and Stanford Ronald McDonald House to help house famillies with kids being treated. And in San Francisco and Oakland is UCSF Beniofff Children's Hospital. And below is an introduction to Imagery To Life, a collection of images from nature and life around us that Tim has put together to initially uplift and inspire health challenged kids. Tim started with Imagery To Life Books for the Stanford Ronald McDonald House, as made possible by the Woodside/Portola Valley Rotary. Since then, through multiple philanthropic donors, Imagery To Life books have been distributed to all the Ronald McDonald Houses in California, and also to the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. As Doug Leffin shared, who then represented the Distraction Therapy Program,  "What you have done here with the Imagery To Life books could not be more valuable for helping with our program."

"This book is dedicated to those who do not get a chance to experience the beauty that is out there in nature. This is especially for kids with health challenges who most likely have never been able to see the ocean, let alone hear it, and experience so many other sights and sounds of nature." - Tim

If you download the app ROAR on your iPhone or android, you can have these images below come to life on your phone with the wizardry of current technology as brought to you by the people at ROAR. More on the Imagery link below...

 Part of Tim's journey making a difference starting with health challenged kids has been finding a special connection with nature in the work he has done with the Imagery To Life mission. What he has grown to learn is that when someone, in this case a young boy or girl, has the chance to experience scenes coming to life with the magic of technology in Imagery To Life, they can have a sense of wonder or even awe in seeing something like this happen. The same reaction can happen with any of us when we see something in nature that is so striking that it can take our mind to a place of such wonder that it replaces, even if for just a moment, whatever may be going on in our mind at the time. It is what a department at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles has described as Distraction Therapy, and they have an entire department devoted to this. So part of Tim's effort to help kids in particular is digging in more to the subject of nature and how it can affect our minds, our attitudes, our perspectives, and leading to our state of health. For that, Tim found that there was no direct source for references to the healing power of nature, so he created a website containing all the references he could find pulling in notable articles, discussions, including TED Talks, and memorable and inspiring quotes on the subject of nature and its benefits. You can see this site at the link below, and Tim looks forward to any additional thoughts or ideas you may have to help make this a better place not only for kids, but for any of us in having a greater awareness to the wondrous capacities of nature to uplift and improve our lives.