We hope you can join our team for this year's Race for Every Child! We're raising money for integrative care services and whole health approaches to care at Children's National Medical Center.

We're excited to have a team for the 7th year, working in collaboration with families and staff members to make a positive difference for kids and families who spend a lot of time at the hospital. Organizing this team is part of the mission of our non-profit, Eliana's Light (www.elianaslight.org), to advocate for integrative care services, Integrative Medicine, and whole health approaches at pediatric medical centers.

We look forward to walking or running with you on Race Day! If you can't make it this year, we welcome your donation. Your donation will go directly to the Special Purpose Fund we created at the hospital to support these efforts. Staff members who request funds from the SPF work alongside us to support families who are at the hospital and when the families are able to go home.

Thanks to the generosity of previous Eliana's Light team members, we've been able to collaboratively start a yoga program for all interested caregivers at Children's National, and also provide 200 "comfort kits" and 200 art therapy kits to parents in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. The "comfort kits" contain "tools" to help build the emotional connection between parent and baby/child, and the art therapy kits are to provide a tool parents and siblings can use to express stress and difficult emotions. A multi-disciplinary team of doctors, nurses, and (physical, occupational, speech, art, and feeding) therapists are collaboratively administering these kits as part of a broader whole health program that recently launched in the Heart Institute (i.e., the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and the Heart & Kidney Unit). We are also collaborating with staff on the development of a department that will mainstream a wider range of a greater number of integrative care services so that all in-patients, and also many caregivers, can benefit from these approaches that support physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

There are lots of exciting things happening in this space at Children's National, and we hope you can join us to support them by participating on team Eliana's Light in the 2019 Race for Every Child!

To register, please visit: https://giving.childrensnational.org/site/TR/FundraisingTR/Race2019?sid=1410&type=fr_informational&pg=informational&fr_id=1240.

To donate, please visit: https://giving.childrensnational.org/site/Donation2?idb=1697011685&df_id=10725&FR_ID=1240&mfc_pref=T&PROXY_ID=2958&10725.donation=form1&PROXY_TYPE=22.

Thank you for your consideration, and please email us if you have any questions (info@elianaslight.org)!