YouTube video monologue by Mary Kostka (Dec 2019) announcing the creation of the Ohana Scholarship Foundation, a nonprofit intended to fund occupational therapy (OT) for children on Medicaid who face long waiting lists. Mary explains the fiscal pressures that forced Ohana to stop accepting new Medicaid patients about a year earlier, that serving Medicaid children cost the practice about $30 per visit, and that $1,000 would sponsor an average full course of treatment (~36 visits). She describes board formation (including two Ohana parents), outreach plans (cards/brochures), and the goal of removing limits on the number of scholarship-funded children so more kids can be taken off multi-year waiting lists.
Questions this video answers
About $30 per visit.
$1,000 would sponsor a full course of treatment (about 36 visits).
About a year before the recording.
From about two-thirds down to one-third (philanthropic portion capped at 1/3).
Up to two years on the waiting list.
Hi everyone. I am so excited to share this news with you. We now have an official non profit to help us see more kids at Ohana. So it's called the Ohana Scholarship Foundation. And this is a little brainchild that our team came up with over the summer when we were looking at our goals and what we cared about and what kind of difference we wanted to make. And one thing that was all in our hearts, in our head was it was just hurting us to see how many kids we had on our waiting list that were on Medicaid. And about a year ago, in order to be fiscally responsible and to have some sustainability and have Ohana serve, survive and make it, about a year ago we had to stop taking any new Medicaid because it cost us about $30 a visit to serve Medicaid children. And we want to help them the same as we want to help everybody. But we also, you know, have to keep the doors open. So a year ago we had to stop taking anybody new and we had to get our numbers from 2/3 down to 1/3. And so our philanthropic portion of our business is it can't go over 1/3 that it's actually costing us money to serve the kids. So the exciting part is we had this great meeting with Colin Bryan who helped facilitate our team and help us problem solve. And what we came up with was that we simply needed a scholarship foundation so that the community could help us see more of these kids. And so now we have one. Now we have what he called the plumbing to make it happen. So it's very exciting. We're so happy. So basically for every, every $30 donated, it sponsors the child for an OT visit. And so $1,000 would sponsor a full course of treatment which would be on average is about 36 visits. So 10, 80 would be sponsor one whole child off the waiting list. So very exciting. And we will output the information for if you know somebody who would like to make contribution, that'd be great. And I will be very quickly will be getting together some, some cards and some brochures and just more things to get the information out there. But it's called the Ohana Scholarship foundation. And who knows, maybe you'll be the very, very first donor. And one thing that's also very exciting to me is of course we have a board for this and two of our board members are a couple of our Ohana moms. So that's pretty exciting. Anyway, I couldn't, I couldn't be more thrilled because all I want to do is help all the kids. And we have kids that are coming off waiting for two years. They've been waiting two years to get into Ohana. And so we had to put on the brakes for the last year. And just now we're able to start taking a couple kids off that waiting list. And the scholarship foundation was make it an unlimited amount of kids that we could get off the waiting list so we can see past our 1/3 limit. So anyway, it's very, very, very, very excited about this because we don't want any kids to have to wait and to feel success and confident and for families to be happy and doing well. So we are very, very excited. Have a great day.
