Ronald McDonald House Charities. Gives seriously ill children the best gift of all- their families. Please support the ceo walk in my shoes campaign on the 13th and 14th of May.
Tony skinner
Hi, and welcome to the podcast channel for podcastmybusiness.com.au and today we have Rachel Stoddart from Ronald McDonald House Charities. That’s rmhc.org.au. How are you, Rachel?
Rachel
I’m great. Thanks, Tony. Thanks for inviting me.
Tony skinner
Thank you for coming along. And, you know, Ronald McDonald House Charities does a lot of good things. Do you guys do the Big Mac campaign Is that you guys?
Rachel
Oh, so yeah, that’s, that’s a partnership that we have with McDonald’s. So McDonald’s is our founding partner. And that’s one way that they raise money for us each year is mchappy day.
Tony skinner
Right?
Rachel
That happens once a year. Normally, in October.
Tony skinner
When we don’t have something preventing people getting together. The world does move on, and the world does walk on. There we go. There’s my segway. Because you guys have got CEO walk in my shoes coming up in about a month’s time or so. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Rachel
Well, we were looking for an experience for CEOs to get involved. And I guess COVID made everyone re evaluate what they were doing and how they were raising money and how we get people involved.
Rachel
And so this is a concept that we came up with during that time, where CEOs get to come into our house over at randwick. And experience for 22 hours, have this immersive experience to see what it’s like for a family who’s actually going through an experience of, of having a very ill child in their family.
Tony skinner
Thats a difficult situation to face with. I mean, I remember quite a few years now, when I was a kid that one of my brothers got hit by a car right in front of us, ran across the road, and one of those things, and you know, he got taken to hospital. And of course, we couldn’t get to see him. Because there wasn’t such a thing as ronald mcdonald house So this is a pretty important thing that you guys actually do.
Rachel
That’s right, well, most of the families that stay with us never thought they would be in this situation, right, you know, just like yourself. So, you know, their child either become a seriously injured like your brother, or they have an illness that they needed to be treated for long term.
Rachel
And they’re living in a place that’s so far away from the hospital that the whole family can’t be with them. So that’s where the idea for McDonald House Charities came along. in Sydney, we’ve been operating at the randwick site now for we just celebrated our 30th birthday last week. And we have people traveling for more than 100 kilometers.
Rachel
So to stay with us, you have to leave more than 100 kilometers away, and be being treated at Sydney Children’s Hospital in randwick. And they can stay with us for as long as they need. And the whole idea is that the sick child can have their whole family with them during their treatment for however long that is.
Tony skinner
Yeah, I think that’s so critical that they get the whole family together, not just one parent on TV where the parent has to sleep in the same room as the child?
Rachel
Yeah, well, it depends on what part of the treatment the child has up to. So sometimes during the child’s treatment, they may be staying in hospital, and a parent may stay in the room with them. So then we’ll have their siblings and the other parent or carer staying with us.
Rachel
But if the child’s doing well, and they’re having day treatment, the whole family will stay together in one room. So we have 31 rooms for families over at randwick. And they are all of varying sizes. So we could have we’ve got rooms as small as for two people and rooms for up to seven people where we can keep that whole family unit together.
Tony skinner
So what what is the immersive experience actually involve? So what does a CEO get to do?
Rachel
Sure. So the CEOs join us on the Thursday afternoon. So if they want to put in half a day’s work beforehand, they can because we’re keeping that in mind too, that they’re very busy people with businesses to run.
Tony skinner
I think we haven’t mentioned it yet. We’re talking about Thursday, the 13th of May.
Rachel
That’s correct. Yes.
Rachel
So they meet with us on the on the Thursday the 13th. We start off We actually accommodate them overnight in a nearby hotel, which is a hotel that families, when we don’t have enough room, we recommend for them to stay because it’s close by the hospital.
Rachel
When they arrive, they’re given a scenario of a family that becomes their family throughout the whole experience. And that scenario is made up of facts of the types of family that we know Stay with us. So it’s like having a very true experience. So when they arrived, they have to Google things as parents do, when a child’s diagnosed about where they come from, how they get to the hospital, the illness that their child is going through and what the treatment might be like.
Rachel
And so they do a little bit of research first, and they come over to the house, and they cook dinner for the families, and they get to meet the families firsthand, that they are actually raising money for throughout this experience, which is a really special part of the experience.
Rachel
After dinner, they go through some more scenario activities, and they stay overnight, there is a special experience in the middle of the night, I’m not going to give that one away, we’ll leave that one as a surprise for anyone who comes along,
Tony skinner
Is that cleaning up somebody who’s who’s spewed up somewhere.
Rachel
We wouldn’t do that.
Rachel
No, but we are trying to simulate what a family might go through with a child thats ill. So in the morning, they come back to us and prepare breakfast for the families. And again, they sit with them to eat and meet the families. And then we’ll have some time with our CEO going through our strategy for the year. And we also present the CEOs with a business problem, that we’re experiencing, we figure if you’re going to have all those great business minds in the room, why not use all of that to come up with ideas to help us solve a business problem that we’re working through.
Rachel
When we had our first experience back in February, that was something that was really invaluable to us. And something that the CEOs really immerse themselves in because of their business acumen that they bring to the experience.
Tony skinner
Absolutely, that’s quite quite clever that you actually do that. And I’m looking at the CEO walk page. So there’s options here, you can register as a CEO, or you can make a donation.
Rachel
That’s right, anyone who’s interested in supporting the house, it costs us $160 a night to keep a room open for a family. And we do that at no cost to the families at all. So if you can imagine, we know we currently have a family staying with us that’s been with us for more than a year. And you can imagine the financial burden on that family if they had to pay for accommodation nearby in a hospital. So that just takes one thing off the mind mind of families so that they can concentrate on their child and keeping their family unit together.
Rachel
You can make a donation. Or you can choose your favorite CEO, and sponsor them or you be a CEO and get involved in yourself. We do have a an entry point of $1500 at the CEOs have to raise, but with the networks that many CEOs have, they’re sort of sending out the message to their networks and people are really getting behind them and being so supportive.
Rachel
If you search for ceowalkinmyshoes.org.au it’ll pop up for you.
Tony skinner
Fantastic. That’s exactly what I needed. Yep. Okay, so let’s go through a little bit more of the ronald McDonald House Charities story as it is 30 years old?
Rachel
That’s right. We’ve we’ve been in randwick for 30 years from McDonald House Charities has been in Australia for 40 years. But the house in randwick, which is where we’re based, has been there for 30 years. And we’re supporting families from all over the country. Mostly they come from regional New South Wales, I would say is where most of our families come from, with a lot of families also coming from the ACT. And we support families of seriously ill children from all different illnesses. So I would say that many of our families do have children going through oncology treatments or being treated for types of cancer. And that requires families to be with us for three to six months at a time.
Rachel
it can be also we do lots of gastrointestinal work because that’s one of the things that our hospital specializes on nearby. A lot of kids going through cerebral palsy treatment. So they’ll come for a few weeks at a time and they’ll be coming to us for a lifetime for that treatment.
Rachel
Or it could be you know that a child has had a farming accident. had a severe break to their leg. And if their local hospital cannot treat the child and they need to come to Sydney, then that’s a reason to be able to stay with us.
Tony skinner
Excellent. And you’ve got it here, we can just come along and have a break, have a respite because it’s a highly stressful environment. And some of us need to get out of that room.
Rachel
Yeah, that’s right. So, you know, apart from the house, which does have some communal aspects, it’s what’s amazing about the house. And it’s something you know, I’ve been with the house for four years. And it’s something that really surprised me was that, you know, when a family first arrives, it’s all about the accommodation having a roof over their head and being very close to the hospital.
Rachel
As a family gets into their new norm of hospital visits, what becomes really important in the house is that community that they create for themselves, when they’re with other families going through similar experiences. And that actually becomes the most important thing for the for the families because they’re, they’re picked up and put into a situation where they’re away from their usual support networks away from extended family and friends. And this becomes the new normal. So the support of other families around them is amazing.
Rachel
But apart from that, we also have the family rooms that we fund from the house in Randwick. So when you’re talking about that respite, all the money that we raised through this campaign also supports the running of the family rooms, which local families can use. So we have one in the Sydney Children’s Hospital at randwick.
Rachel
One in the Royal North Shore hospital, and also one in Wollongong hospital. So we have amazing volunteers that help us run that we fund the running off that from the randwick house as well.
Tony skinner
Yeah, and like, I didn’t realize but yes, you’re different talking to the right person. I have family out in Central Western New South Wales. my nephew’s are much older now. But yeah, thankfully, I didn’t need that particular service. But it’s good to know it’s there. Because we’re in the cities, we forget, there are people outside, even up to the Blue Mountains and beyond.
Rachel
That’s right families everywhere, you know, children being diagnosed with serious illnesses or becoming injured. And you know, where we’re very lucky in Australia that we have great access to health care.
Rachel
We’re just an added piece to that puzzle, trying to keep families together throughout their treatment. So just trying to ease a little bit of that burden for them when they’re going through that tough time.
Tony skinner
Yeah, told me that. I mean, you’ve been with one on McDonald House Charities for, like you said, for four years. So how do you cope with getting close to families as they come in? And they obviously do eventually move on? So how do you deal with that?
Rachel
It’s a good question. It’s a one that we’re often asked the way that I look at it. Most of the time, Ronald McDonald House has a really happy place. A lot of people when they visit, expect it to be a sad place. And sometimes a child’s treatment doesn’t end the way in which we would hope and a child passes away.
Rachel
But for us, mostly, it is a happy place, where clinical treatments happening in the hospital. And where we work is a family’s home. So we get to see kids being kids and families being families.
Rachel
Even if the the outcome isn’t as we would hope, the way that we look at it is that we could be there for a family in a time when they needed it. And we could provide a place for a family to make memories that they might not have otherwise had the chance to make had there not been given the place to do that. So it is our absolute privilege to support families on their journey to recovery.
Tony skinner
Yeah, absolutely. And and that’s the thing is that you got to be there be available. And yeah, it’s been a challenge. right around with what we’ve all gone through the past 12 months or more. And yeah, thanks very much for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Rachel
Well, we have a few more spots open. So if you’re a CEO, you’re a senior manager, you’re a board member or director. We’d love to have you involved. It’s a very intimate experience. We have up to 13 people and I’ve got four more spots available for May. So it’s a beautiful opportunity to meet some of our families, get to know the charity, get to gain a firsthand understanding of what families go through.
Rachel
It’s also a beautiful networking opportunity as well, where you get to spend 22 hours with other like minded CEOs doing something amazing for some amazing families. Yeah, sign up.
Tony skinner
I just did that search on Google, just type in CEO walk. And it’s right there. So it’s perfect. Great. All right. Thanks very much for your time, Rachel.
Rachel
You’re welcome. Thanks, Tony.
Ronald McDonald House Charities. Gives seriously ill children the best gift of all- their families. Please support the ceo walk in my shoes campaign.