Give Kids The World is the destination for children
from around the world with their families,
and these children have a critical illness
and share one wish, and that's to come experience
all the magic that Central Florida has to offer.
We provide accommodations, and tickets, and attractions,
and food, and beverage, and parties, and all of that
for a complete week's stay for the entire family.
Henri Landwirth is the founder.
He was a hotelier here in the Central Florida area,
and he actually owned the very first Holiday Inn
right outside out of the Main Gate.
It was the Holiday Inn Main Gate East of Disney World.
The wish granting organizations, when they would identify
a child who had a wish to come to Disney, they would often
call his hotel and say,
"Hey, would you mind putting the family up for free,
"if we make all the other arrangements?"
And he would always say yes.
And then one day, he got the call
that a reservation was canceled.
It was for a little girl named Amy, from Virginia.
She'd been battling leukemia, and time simply ran out.
I had a wonderful career at Disney, thought I would never,
ever leave, and then one fateful day, I was asked to be
a fourth for tennis.
My partner was Henri Landwirth, and I guess you can say
the rest was history.
When I got here we only had 32 villas.
Fast forward, now we have 166.
We had no attractions, the only thing that was here
were the 32 villas, the admin building,
and we served ice cream out of a caboose.
So that will give you a flavor for what it was like.
Now when you think about what we have,
we have the Castle Of Miracles,
we have a Boundless Playground,
we have four attractions that are wheelchair accessible.
We have an Amberville Station where it's filled with games
for the kids to play, a miniature golf course for the kids.
We have a movie theater, we have a town hall building.
It has just grown exponentially, and of course the number
of volunteers have grown, and the number of families
that we serve.
The first year we only served 300 families,
this year we'll probably serve 8,400 families.
The one thing about the village
is we want to keep it whimsical,
because we want to have all the children,
it's always the children first.
If you look in the gingerbread house
where they have the meals,
it's all children's sized seats.
In the villas the children get the big bedroom,
and the big bathroom with the big whirlpool,
and the wheel-in shower.
If you look for one sustaining theme throughout,
it's just what would a child like?
Castle Of Miracles, we just celebrated our 25th anniversary
of that, believe it or not.
We opened that in 1994.
Beautiful facility.
It was the very first wheelchair-accessible carousel.
Hand-carved wood, so that was very unique about it.
It was built at a time when there was not a lot
of nighttime activities, so it was really the hub
of the village.
And then someone came up with the idea
of putting a gold star on the ceiling of the castle
for every child who'd been to the village.
And we started it very rudimentary,
ask the child to sit down, write their name on a star,
we put it in a box, and then we'd have the Star Fairy
come down in the middle of the night and swoop up
all the stars and put them on the ceiling.
And about a year and a half, two years after we started,
there was a mother that came down.
This was November, they were from Chicago,
and they had been down on their wish in March of that year.
And her little boy, Danny, had passed away in October,
and she flew down from Chicago just to see his star,
because she said it represented the happiest week
of his life.
So of course we hadn't tracked all the stars
at that time, so it took us an hour and half to find it,
but after that day, we now track all the stars.
But I think even more significant,
is the families tell us that they feel often
that they're alone, that nobody can really understand
what they're going through.
Moms will tell me when they walk into that castle,
and they look up at that ceiling, and they see over 100,000
stars, they don't feel alone anymore, because they know
there's been other families
that have dealt with very similar things.
Oh my goodness, we simply could not exist
without our volunteers.
We have about 18,000 active volunteers.
They fill nearly 1,800 volunteer shifts each and every week.
Every guest comment that we receive just talks about
what those volunteers meant.
These families are struggling back at home,
and there's usually doctor's appointments,
and doctor visits, and hospital stays.
And here, what they come to find is that they've got
complete strangers who are here for no other reason
than to just to make sure that every answer
to every question is, "Yes!"
"How can we serve you?
"How can we make life easier for you?"
Ice cream, we've always served ice cream here,
and when we started it was out of a caboose.
It was a literal train caboose that it was served in.
And every time we would expand
we'd have to move the caboose.
And finally, it became, well there's nowhere to move it,
so we decided to make an ice cream palace.
And we would serve ice cream in the evenings.
And then one day, I was trying to find a quiet place
where there were no phones ringing,
I wanted to do some work,
and so I went into the ice cream palace,
and I hear this little tapping on the window
and I turn around, this little boy on tiptoe,
he's peeking in, it's like 8:00 in the morning.
He says, "Are you open?"
I said, "Well sure, what do you want?"
And he said, "I want a banana split."
And I said, "Okay, and it's okay with your parents?"
So I brought him in, and I got stuck behind the counter.
Once the doors opened, an hour and a half later,
I'm serving banana splits, and hot fudge sundaes,
and ice cream cones, and it's just crazy!
So the next day we started serving, starting at 7:30
in the morning until 9:30 at night, and that's been
a mainstay of the village ever since.
I always wanted a way to remember Henri and have his legacy
kept alive here at the village, because there's so many
people now that haven't met Henri, board members and staff.
We came up with the idea of redoing the ice cream palace,
because it was one of his favorite things as well.
And Henri got his start in the hotel business,
and he was the general manager of the Starlite Motel
on the Space Coast during those pioneering days
of space exploration.
So all the original astronauts stayed at his hotel.
Henri's Starlite Scoops is gonna be a phenomenal place
that will continue that tradition
of always serving ice cream,
no matter what time of day or night the kids want it,
but it will have a lot of history about Henri,
and his experience.
We have a 30 foot diameter spaceship on top.
It's just gonna be really cool.
It's the first time that Disney Creative
and Universal Creative have come together
and worked together on a project.
To even say that is just amazing.
That just never happens.
But it's because of their tremendous commitment
to the children and the village
that they were able to do that.
I think we're so closely aligned
with the hospitality industry,
and of course the theme park industry,
that as I like to say, when I do presentations and things,
we're really all in the same business,
we want to create the perfect guest experience
for our guests.
The hospitality and the theme park industry does it
because they want their guests to keep coming back
time and time again.
We have to do it because our guests can't come back.
We get one opportunity to do it right.
What we try to do, because we understand the incredible
partnership that we have,
is how do we draw them in to those fundraising?
And that's where those things come about.
Coasting For Kids is an excellent example,
where you get the coasting enthusiasts,
as well as a lot of our families,
our alumni families from around the world,
they go and they do fundraising for us too
because it helps them relive their experiences
at the village.
We just think of those different things,
the Disney Ride Challenge is another one,
where folks come down and try to cram all,
I guess it's 46 rides now, into one day.
And I've done that twice.
I've only gotten to 43 of 45 twice,
so I'm looking forward to my next opportunity to do it.
It's a challenge, for sure.
Those are the kinds of things.
We try to find things that are fun, that are engaging,
that are a little bit different than other folks do,
just to try to bring our corporate partners in as well.
We really have three words that sum up how folks
can get involved; it's give, serve, or share.
Of course giving of your time, of giving your resources,
your treasures, go online and make a donation,
because it takes about 21 million dollars a year
just to operate the village.
We're very proud to say that we take good care of hearts
while we're taking care of business.
Seven cents of every dollar goes to administration
and overhead, and 93 cents of every dollar goes directly
to the mission.
So when folks give, hopefully they feel
like we're very good stewards of those resources.
Serving, of course volunteering,
filling 1,800 volunteer shifts a week.
We get a lot of local volunteers,
we've got a lot of church groups that come,
youth groups, so you can come in and volunteer
for a day, or for a week, or for whatever.
And then the third way is just to share our story.
We're probably one of the world's best-kept secrets,
not many people have heard about Give Kids The World,
so let people know about us.
Visit our website, there's always really great opportunities
there to learn how to give, serve, or share.