An Amazing and Humbling First Year
It has been one year since we launched Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes and had our lives changed for the better. We didn’t know what kind of attention or impression we would make on the world. We hoped we would get some smiles from the kids that we helped, but we never expected the amount of love and support that came our way. We were humbled every step of our journey.
In January 2015, we decided to take our love of building wheelchair costumes for our son and expand it to start making costumes for other kids in wheelchairs and walkers. We were asked to showcase our work at Planet Comicon in Kansas City. So for the first few months, we worked on many designs for costumes and built a special costume our son to wear at Planet Comicon. Our booth featured multiple costumes on display, plus posters of many more costumes we had made over the years. We hoped to send a little spark into the city letting people know that we build these costumes for kids in walkers and wheelchairs, free of charge to the families. Every single person that stopped by our booth was amazed at what we were taking on, and each one of them opened their wallets to make a donation, or to sign up to help build the costumes later that year. We were amazed by the generosity of the Planet Comicon attendees. We were even featured on the evening news and made national headlines.
We launched a Kickstarter campaign in the summer, to help fund the cost of 5 costumes for kids in special needs equipment. We were hoping to raise $1,000 over 30 days. We ended up achieving that goal in only 2 days!!! We announced that the more money we raised, the more costumes we would be able to build. We ended up raising just under $3,000!!! We were featured again on websites and even in a few European print magazines.
We were honored to be invited to the Kansas City Comic Con in August where we debuted our most ambitious costume yet, the Baymax costume from Disney’s “Big Hero 6” movie. Our son wore the costume for three days and loved all the attention he was getting. We received even more attention and it helped us recruit artists from the comic con floor to design new costumes for us. We received many more donations and had more volunteers sign up for our upcoming costume builds.
By the end of August, we had selected 10 kids from the many that sent requests in, that we were building custom designed costumes for their wheelchairs. We sketched out the designs and had the parents approve them. Then we had our first Costume Workshop hosted by the Kansas City Woodworkers Guild. They donated a large space for us to build 6 costumes with about 35-40 volunteers from all ages. We had a second workshop where we finished out the remaining 4 costumes and had them all either shipped to the families or delivered locally.
All of the families had their costumes well before Halloween and sent us pictures and letters of smiling children, laughing in their costumes. It was amazing to help out, even in such a small way. Some of those costumes even won costume contests for the children.
Right before Halloween, we received another special gift. Finding My Way Books had been working on a children’s book about our son, Reese, and the costumes we build for him. The book was finished and is now at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. It is titled, “Reese Has A Halloween Secret” and it shows our entire process of how we come up with a costume idea, our research on how to build it, how we gather the supplies and how we all work together as a family to build the costume for our son. This same process is what we do with every costume from Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes. We take pride in what we do and hope to grow into a larger non-profit company for 2016.
Our goals for 2016 are to find more volunteers willing to help, feature additional workshops where volunteers can come and learn how to build these costumes for these kids, have additional artists around the globe help design these amazing costumes, raise additional funds to help support this endeavor and hopefully some corporate sponsors willing to sponsor 1, 2 or more costumes.
Last year we made 10 costumes, but there were many more requests that came in. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the resources or volunteers to help make all of them. We hope to get to a point where we don’t have to turn kids away and can easily make each costume for each special child.
Help us achieve our goal for 2016 by donating, volunteering and sharing our story on social media. Find out more about Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes at www.WalkinRollin.org.
Lon Davis
Owner
Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes