Quilters create comfort for hospitalized youth

HOPE — Some 40 Christian ladies from many parts of the Inland Empire gathered for a weekend of quilt-making to benefit Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital. The retreat took place at the Litehouse-family facility on the shoreline of Lake Pend Oreille in Hope, Idaho.

Joyce Bankhead of Heron, Mont., said the dedicated group, Sew Blessed Quilters, would donate this weekend’s production of quilts to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane.

“Where donated quilts have typically gone to pediatric and IC units, the hospital this year is accepting them for oncology and neonatal patients as well,” Bankhead said. “Our quilts become a form of comfort and reassurance especially to children suffering from disease and sickness.”

The idea of donating to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital was inspired when quilters from Spokane Valley Assembly gave Bankhead a sizable quantity of quilting materials for use in her Adult Education quilting classes in Heron, Montana.

“That was so great! I wanted to give back. Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital just seemed like a very good cause to receive our gifts,” Bankhead said. So she invited the Spokane Valley Quilters to join her and other north Idaho quilters for a retreat to make quilts that would be donated to the Children’s Hospital.

Shirley Kaiser and Janita Butler, of Spokane, were among the first to network with Bankhead for good causes. Kaiser said the common interest for most of the women at the retreat was, “quilting and our love of the Lord.”

Various groups of quilters give to all sorts of things, Kaiser said, but her group gives wherever they see a need.

The Spokane Valley Quilters, to which Kaiser and Butler belong, produce close to 300 quilts a year, according to Kaiser. “We donate primarily to Hospice patients but in some cases to homeless people as well. The Spokane Valley Quilters are gearing up to donate quilts to as many as 15 veterans on the 10th of November,” Kaiser added.

“We are blessed to be able to do what we love to do and to bless other people with what we produce,” Kaiser said. “The Lord has provided what we need: donations of fabric, donations of money to buy the batting … so long as he provides, we’ll keep giving.”

Kaiser explained that the initial group of six quilters started out giving quilts to people who were terminally ill. Then they discovered that the families, who lost their loved ones, kept those quilts in comforting memory. When a newspaper article was published on what they were doing, the group grew in size and donations of fabrics came pouring in for the Spokane Valley Quilters to utilize.

Then a doctor in Henderson, Nevada, donated real money. He had lost his mother to cancer, but remembering how important the quilt she had been given was to her, he donated $250 to the group who made her quilt. The following year, he gave them $500 and for each of the last six years, he’s given $1,000 to help these quilters sustain their cause.

“With that money, we were even able to donate to other quilters like Joyce Bankhead and many of these ladies with us today who are actively reaching out to the needs of others,” Kaiser said.

Butler added, “We don’t do fundraisers. We just give what the Lord provides.”

Philanthropy officer Mary Savage also was on hand at the retreat for the Providence Health Care Foundation. She was there to receive the quilts and to encourage the women who volunteered their time and energy through this kind of material donation.

“This group, Sew Blessed Quilters, has been donating to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital and others for quite awhile,” Savage said. “We asked if we could take them on a tour of Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital so they could really see where their quilts were going and more fully understand the impact these gifts were making.”

Thirteen of the quilters from Sew Blessed went for the tour last June, according to Savage. “[That tour] really brought it to light for them, because many said they had no idea what was happening at the Children’s Hospital and how much impact these quilts had on the children who received them and on their families.”

Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital serves about 55,000 children annually, according to Savage. “We are the only full-fledged children’s hospital between Minneapolis and Seattle Children’s Hospital,” she said. “So we are literally servicing pediatric patients from Montana, Idaho and Western Washington all the way down to the Oregon border.”

The quilters who went on the tour saw the affect they were making by adding something handmade to a stark, sometimes frightening environment. They saw first hand that insecure children, most of whom did not feel good, would snuggle into their new quilts and hold on to them, Savage explained. The quilters were able to see that their labor of love brought comfort and security, she said, to a great many children.

“Generally speaking, when children are in a hospital, they don’t ever get to make any decisions except about maybe what they want to eat,” Savage said. “So we learned we could bring several quilts into the room so the child could make a choice as to which one they would like to have. That one act empowered many children who otherwise had no choice about anything.”

Many children who are in and out of the hospital with long term illnesses bring their personally chosen quilts every time they come. That’s because it comforts them. It gives them something to hold onto in a scary situation. In that sense, allowing them to choose their own quilt from several others somehow empowers them, according to Savage.

“We are so fortunate,” Savage emphasized, “because we have many dedicated women across the Inland Northwest making quilts for these children.”

Providence St. Joseph Healthcare is a large non-profit healthcare system spanning seven states in the Pacific Northwest. The Sisters of Providence literally started health care in the Northwest, according to Savage.

The Providence Health Care Foundation serves to provide funding to six of the hospitals in this region. Last year, she said, her team raised 6.6 million dollars. They disperse those funds through an internal grant process. Last year, her team gave back 11.1 million dollars to these hospitals through grant funding.

“We have over 200 funds within our foundation from which we can give grant funding to our various ministries,” she said. “Our investments performed very well last year. We have endowed funds from which we can only spend the interest and our funds performed so well that we were able to give the largest amount back that we’ve ever given from our foundation.”

“And these women,” Savage concluded, “are so amazing. They give countless hours to their quilting and then they give it away to a child that they are never going to meet. Joyce Bankhead is exemplary; she’s got three generations of quilters here. Joyce is a servant leader and in that, an example for all of us.”

Feature correspondent Dwayne Parsons can be reached for comments or story suggestions by emailing him at DwayneDailyBee@gmail.com.