Ronald McDonald House Charities of Charleston eyes expansion

Ronald McDonald House Charities of Charleston has had to turn away some 500 families each year for the last three years for lack of space. 

The facility doesn’t have enough beds to serve all the families who need it, said Kathy "kp" Papadimitriou, CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Charleston, and that’s before taking into consideration the growth that will come with the completion of the new MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital set to open next year. 

For those reasons, the charity has started planning for a capital campaign to expand the existing facility on Gadsden Street. 

The Ronald McDonald House Charities of Charleston provides a "home-away-from-home" for families with children in the hospital. There’s no required charge to families and no financial means test; families are admitted based on the severity of the child’s illness and if they live at least 40 miles away from MUSC. Although the McDonald’s system is the founding mission partner of RMHC, which now number more than 365 houses across the globe, the corporation and local owner/operators make up 10 percent of the charity’s annual budget, with local contributions funding the remainder. Papadimitriou said the community will be crucial to the Charleston house’s growth. 

“We are going to need the help of the community to do this; there’s no question. This is going to be bigger than anything we’ve taken on,” Papadimitriou said. 

The Charleston house just celebrated its 35th anniversary. Charles P. Darby, M.D., professor emeritus, was instrumental in establishing the house, which opened Sept. 10, 1983 with 12 bedrooms. After an expansion in 2006 and a renovation in 2015, the house now has 32 bedrooms. But an assessment by RMHC Global shows the house should have 55 bedrooms just to meet the current need. 

Papadimitriou and the staff are in the process of showing preliminary drawings to focus groups of families, former families, volunteers, medical staff and donors to get feedback on everything from the architectural style of the exterior to the types of communal spaces that families need. They also want to gauge how much support they could expect for a capital campaign. 

The charity is aiming to expand to 65 rooms so it can meet the community need for the next decade, but one of the challenges of doubling in size is maintaining the familial feel of the space. 

Families who stay in the house build a bond that lasts. Many continue to get together or return to the house as volunteers, Papadimitriou said. 

“We have a lot of families who continue to bring back their children, and the children will say, ‘This is the house I was born in.’ Well, they weren’t born here; they were born across the street,” Papadimitriou said. Yet the children identify with the house – they see the playroom as “their” playroom and the house dog Gardy as “their” dog. Children see Papadimitriou working in her office and walk in to “work” on their coloring next to her. 

“It’s that feeling that’s really the value of the charity,” Papadimitriou said. “Our challenge as we grow is how we keep that specialness. We don’t ever want to lose that.”

Preliminary drawings show a new space with larger bedrooms, each having its own bathroom, built atop the current parking lot that fronts Calhoun Street. A breezeway would connect the new building to the current one. 

About 75 percent of families stay less than two weeks. Some stay much longer, though. One family stayed 224 nights last year, said Rachel Morrison, director of marketing. Pediatric transplant patients generally must remain near the hospital for some time after they’ve been discharged, ranging from a few days for organ transplant patients to up to 100 days for bone marrow transplant patients. Special rooms for transplant and longer stay patients are slightly larger than the other bedrooms, Morrison said. 

Besides adding bedrooms, the charity wants to reduce the current 40-miles-from-MUSC distance guideline, Morrison said. The smaller bedrooms in the old building might also lend themselves to day passes for locals who need a spot to shower or nap for a few hours, Papadimitriou added. 

The charity is also looking at how MUSC is expanding regionally in a hub-and-spoke system and considering how it can support that expansion. One of the ideas Papadimitriou is considering is whether the charity should have a shuttle bus to the new pediatric ambulatory facility in North Charleston, also scheduled to open in 2019. Papadimitriou said she’s evaluating whether the Baby STEPS parent information and support program should be offered in North Charleston rather than downtown and if the house should establish a family room or hospitality cart there. 

Morrison said the support of volunteers — whether it’s groups cooking meals or coming in to deep clean, individuals saving pop tabs off soda or beer cans or industry groups donating materials — is invaluable to keeping the house running. And all of these efforts are focused on making sure everything is provided for families so the families can focus “100 percent on their child’s recovery,” she said.