Voices of Impact Joins Forces With Healthy Room Project to Bring Bedroom Makeovers to Kids in Need

Voices of Impact, formerly known as Your Special Day, is no stranger to providing memorable experiences for families facing challenges. Its signature program arranges a day of fun for children who live with (and often take care of) parents who are chronically ill or have a disability. Now the organization is helping to give these children not just a day to remember but also a transformative improvement to their lives.

It all begins in the bedroom, an essential space for children to play, study, and sleep. A new California-based nonprofit organization named the Healthy Room Project renovates bedrooms in one-day stealth operations that surprise and delight the kids who had been living in suboptimal spaces. To execute these upgrades — which usually include new beds, desks, dressers, lamps, bedding, and paint — the Healthy Room Project partners with parents, mentors, educators, guardians, and local law enforcement, who help to locate ideal makeover recipients, who often reside in a single-parent household, have faced homelessness, or have been victims of abuse.

Looking to expand its mission in helping children and their families in challenging situations, GRoW grantee Voices of Impact paired up with the Healthy Room Project to bring joy — and, yes, a spiffy new bedroom — to a family in the Los Angeles community of Watts. An eleven-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother whose mother has a chronic health challenge were sharing a bedroom that had been only half-painted, contained a broken dresser, and lacked doors on its closet.

One late February morning, a team consisting of members from both organizations — as well as volunteers including a police officer from Modesto, California who drove hours to pitch in — started work in the morning, first building furniture in the driveway and painting the room so the walls would dry in time for the grand reveal in the afternoon. When the siblings arrived home from school, there were tears of joy, laughter, and a new beginning: The gleaming new bedroom features bunk beds to free up more space, two new desks, a new dresser, and a closet organizer.

Voices of Impact is hard at work with the Healthy Room Project on the next makeover project as these organizations aim to make more unsuspecting children's dreams come true — and make it easier for them to dream at night.