We would like to say a huge Thank You to the Toledo Community Foundation’s Helping Hens Fund for Making Our Dream Come True!

Every child deserves a chance to ride a bike, and thanks to the Toledo Community Foundation (TCF) and the Helping Hens Fund, sponsored by the Toledo Mud Hens, we can now ride TOGETHER!

The Toledo Community Foundation and the Toledo Mud Hens Baseball Club’s Helping Hens Fund just awarded Sara’s Garden $5,944 for four new Rifton Adaptive Tricycles for our special needs students and summer campers. With these tricycles, we’ll now have enough for one classroom of New Horizons Academy students to ride to the park together. Bicycling is about more than just gross motor development. It is also about building friendships and socializing together. Thanks to a previous family donation and a donation from St. Caspar’s Knights of Columbus (K of C) Council #8829, we now have six Rifton Adaptive Tricycles for our students to use and enjoy, both for recreation and therapy.

The Toledo Community Foundation’s Helping Hens Fund promotes the overall fitness and wellness of children in kindergarten through twelfth grade in the Greater Toledo Metropolitan Area by sponsoring exercise, sports and/or physical recreation programming. “Play is such an essential component in the lives of children,” explained Matt Rychener, Director of Sara’s Garden. “Through play, kids are able to define who they are and who they want to be. In addition to the youthful exuberance that bike riding brings, these adaptive tricycles bring many therapeutic benefits to children, who spend a great deal of their time sitting or using a cane or walker, including strengthening their lower extremities, patterning their leg motions, developing balancing skills, using visual and spatial perception for steering, and interacting with peers and classmates. Thanks to such generous community support and encouragement like yours, New Horizons Academy School has grown to over 100 students!”

The Toledo Community Foundation, Inc. is a public charitable organization created by citizens of our community to enrich the quality of life for individuals and families in our area. In existence since 1973, the TCF has more than 800 funds with assets of approximately $291 million. The TCF provides philanthropic services for individuals, families, businesses, and corporations to meet their charitable giving needs. For more information on the Toledo Community Foundation or its Helping Hens Fund, log onto www.toledocf.org or follow it on Facebook.

As you can see from the pictures, our New Horizons Academy students, Christian Lee and Taylar Alpaugh, want to “Thank you for giving us a chance to ride TOGETHER!”