It's not every day you hear of people loving Monday. To most people, Mondays are the back-to-the-grind day, a day of alarm clocks, deadlines and a slow start to the week.
To founder and CEO of The Monday Life, Joey McMahon, Monday is a game-changer.
The Monday Life, a North Carolina-based non-profit organization with national reach, is transforming Monday from the dreary start of a week into a chance to literally change a life. Devoted to improving the environments of pediatric hospital patients to help them heal faster and be happier, The Monday Life orbits around a simple idea-an idea so simple, in fact, it rocks the world of hospitalized kids throughout the country: one dollar, every Monday.
One dollar, one day of the week, so a pediatric patient can experiment with Art Therapy, which often results in shorter hospital stays. One dollar so a kid can feel better, faster, via exceptional methods such as Pet Therapy or Music Therapy. One dollar that allows nurses to host movie nights, or create science experiments. One dollar that means kids can have access to the latest and greatest technology and stay involved in a world beyond their hospital beds. Five thousand one-dollars, all added up, to create a better playground at Duke Children's Hospital.
And that's just the beginning. Mondays have never been so cool.
As McMahon, former Duke Basketball manager said, "It is only a dollar, but when you add it all up, it is doing a lot of great things." From little things, big things grow, and The Monday Life's mission to create happiness and health in hospitals is expanding rapidly. Currently, The Monday Life works with hospitals throughout the nation (CHOP, Seattle Children's Hospital, Miami Children's Hospital, and Duke Children's Hospital, to name a few) but with the launch of their most recent venture, the reasons to love Mondays just increased tenfold. The Monday Life: Healing Campaigns acts asa kickstarter for the medical field: Nurses create campaigns that will enhance the environments of hospitalized kids (everything from DVDs to iPads to art supplies), people go online and donate any amount, and kids receive. Since any hospital in the country can use Healing Campaigns, The Monday Life stands poised to alter the lives of kids forever. They're not just offering the chance for pediatric patients to enjoy their childhoods, escape their illnesses, and experience cool new technology. The Monday Life makes it possible for hospitalized kids to experience the three H's, three extraordinarily significant, often underestimated qualities we take for granted a bit too often: Health, happiness and hope.
It is those things, those H's, alone that can change the world, backed by people with the compassion and vivacity to make the world a better place. It is not uncommon to hear people discussing, often with vigor and lust, the "good life": fast cars, immaculate clothes, the glitz and glamour that often masquerade as our perception of "success." Turns out, there is a different kind of "good life": The Monday Life. In short, the Monday life is the life everyone should be living. Their heroes are the innocent, who manage to be intuitive and curious and hopeful within circumstances that are often grim, who handle struggle that would leave most adults weak-kneed with courage and humor.
And the team determined to stand behind them, making the battle a little less frightening and a little more fun? The Monday Life crew, who think Mondays should rock and that sick kids deserve to feel great. Described by Kaushik Sahoo, a junior at Duke University who works in Technology for The Monday Life, as a "tight-knit community," The Monday Life is ready to build a movement, something everyone, from donors to nurses to some insanely deserving kids, can take part in. From nurses creating campaigns to people backing them, from one dollar every Monday to hosting your own fundraising event, through The Monday Life, everyone has the healing power, and we owe it to these kids to use it.
Maybe, starting with Monday, we begin changing our own corner of the world. Maybe we skip Starbucks a few times a week, and donate those dollars. Maybe we help out with a healing campaign that makes it possible for kids to chill out from their treatments with a movie night. Maybe we just tweet about the power of Mondays. Maybe we all start living the Monday Life.
Change your thoughts, and you'll change your world. Think Monday.
To check out The Monday Life or create a Healing Campaign, visit: www.healingcampaigns.org