[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGE courtesy Virgila Dale’s Photography”][/title]
As the incumbent parents of five children, Drew Deffenbaugh and his wife Brandi are no strangers to the arrival of babies. But last year, when their first set of twins arrived six weeks early, they discovered just how much they didn’t know.
“Our twins started having issues back and forth,” Drew says. “They took them straight back to the NICU and that’s where they stayed.”
The Deffenbaughs, both educators in the Van Buren Public School District, thus began an around-the-clock vigil, while physicians monitored little Kylie and Kade and addressed various health issues as days turned into weeks.
“We really didn’t know what we were in for, dealing with all the issues that preemies deal with,” Drew says. “It was stressful; we were there seeing the babies whenever they would let us see them. I could not drag my wife away, you know, we’d hold them whenever we could.”
Early on, a nurse told the couple about the Ronald McDonald Family Room, operated by Ronald McDonald House Charities of Arkoma. The room provided the weary parents a place to sleep, grab something to eat, get a shower before going back on baby watch. Drew says the Family Room was a godsend under such stressful conditions.
“Keep in mind, we were gonna be there regardless, but we would’ve been sleeping in waiting rooms, sleeping on chairs, if we had not had Ronald McDonald Family Room,” he says. “It was such a blessing.”
The Deffenbaughs’ story mirrors that of countless other parents and families of children with serious health problems who have all benefitted from the presence of the Family Room. And soon, the nonprofit organization will be able to help even more families at a time, having announced the construction of a stand-alone Ronald McDonald House, to break ground this fall.
Erin Farrah, community outreach and volunteer manager with Ronald McDonald House Charities of Arkoma, says a capital campaign got off to a fast start last year with the arrival of a substantial anonymous donation. That, as well as brisk donor participation since, reinforces how eager people are to see the house get built.
“We started our private campaign in the spring of this year and made our public announcement on July sixth,” she says. “We have currently raised two-thirds of the funds to build this house. It’s a $3 million campaign and we have raised just about $2 million.
“A lot of the people who donate with us have had an experience with the Ronald McDonald House. They understand the impact that it can have on families that have children in the hospital. We get a majority of families from the NICU, but we don’t just serve NICU families; it’s available to anyone with a child in the hospital twenty-one years of age or younger.”
The stand-alone house is only the second in Arkansas, the other residing in Little Rock, operated by Ronald McDonald House Charities of Arkansas. In addition to the Family Room within Mercy Hospital Fort Smith, the Arkoma group also operates a similar set-up at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, opened in 2016. Erin says while the purpose is the same, the difference in definition between a house and a family room boils down to capacity.
“At the Family Room that we have in Fort Smith right now, there are four rooms and we are constantly having a wait list to serve families,” she says. “Having to turn people away from staying with us who have driven from thirty minutes, an hour, two hours away is really tough.
“This house will have eleven bedrooms in it, so we will be able to serve a total of fifteen families whose children are in the hospital. Getting to expand our services to more people who need it is really what fueled us wanting to build this house.”
Plans call for a one-level, eight thousand-square-foot house, featuring state-of-the-art kitchen, laundry room, media room and playroom in addition to the bedrooms. Outside will feature a number of spaces including a front and back patio, the latter adjacent to the inside dining area making it easy for people to go eat outside.
“We’ll also have a playground on the outside and what we’re calling a serenity garden,” Erin says. “The serenity garden is for adults only to be able to relax in those stressful times.”
In order to commence building, Ronald McDonald House had to reach at least the two-thirds mark of its campaign goal. Besides the initial anonymous gift, that requirement was advanced considerably by Mercy Hospital Fort Smith donating the ground upon which the house will be built, a footprint where the Mercy Educational Center currently stands.
“The new Ronald McDonald House will be a tremendous gift to families whose infants are being cared for at Mercy Fort Smith,” says Ryan Gehrig, president of Mercy Hospital Fort Smith. “The opportunity to provide families with a free place to stay while their infants are in Mercy’s neonatal intensive care unit is something we have embraced from the very beginning. The new Ronald McDonald House will be just behind our Labor and Delivery Department, which allows easy access to and from the medical center.
“We have had a wonderful relationship with Ronald McDonald House Charities over the years and have been able to help so many families through their Family Room at Mercy Fort Smith. During that time, the community has stepped up and become involved by donating things such as meals and snacks for these families. We are pleased to be able to continue and expand this relationship with Ronald McDonald House Charities as we provide space for the new location.”
As with many organizations, Ronald McDonald House has had to think creatively about fundraisers, given the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, supporters have responded well; a virtual event in June was a big success and organizers are hoping the group’s largest event, October’s Red Shoe Shindig, also to be held virtually, will follow suit.
“Fundraising can be really difficult right now, especially for a lot of nonprofits, but people in the community are very aware of how big of a need this is,” Erin says. “At our virtual fundraiser in June, we ended up raising about $80,000 just from ticket sales and individual donations, which was really amazing. We’re really grateful for that.
“A lot of the push for the campaign is through the media right now. We’ve had really great feedback from social media from the announcement itself. We are also doing donor videos. We have t-shirts that we gave out to people to wear around town with our campaign hashtag #BuildTheHouse to spread the word in their own personal circles.”
As you might expect, the Deffenbaugh family can’t say enough about the new project, given the month they spent tending to their newest family members. Drew says while the tots have rebounded incredibly well – to the point you would never guess they were preemies – he and Brandi remember well the mental and emotional toll their births took and how much easier the experience was thanks to the Ronald McDonald Family Room.
“It was priceless, especially because we were able to go through that experience with other people who truly understood what we were going through,” he says. “That really helped us cope. [Families] were able to minister to each other at different times. We’d be going through something, having a rough night, and other couples would be there to encourage us and vice versa.
“We got to meet people that we probably would never have met, and we created a bond like no other, simply because they could really empathize with us and we with them. Emotionally, that helped us quite a bit.”
To learn more about Ronald McDonald House Charities and how you can be of service, visit
rmhcofarkoma.org or call 479.756.5600.
