Joey McMahon was fresh out of college when he realized he was living an unfulfilling life. Joey decided to combat his feeling by creating an organization that allows him to give back to others.
Miracle Mondays is a non-profit organization that helps increase the quality of hospital visits for children. The organization helps bring color to the lives of children by providing things such as art supplies and poetry.
Soon Miracle Mondays will be coming to Pepperdine.
The volunteers of Miracle Mondays interview children at hospitals to discover what kind of things the children want. These items are then put on a checklist that is featured on the non-profit organization’s website miraclemondays.org. The items delivered to the children are chosen based on popularity – how many children put that particular item on their own list.
Volunteers also lead activities like window painting. They gather window paints for each of the children and together paint and decorate the windows in their rooms.
Miracle Mondays has made a huge impact on the East Coast. Baseball teams donate signed baseball cards and hand-deliver them to the kids. Disney is another major donor — it recently donated iPads to hospitals in the program.
Alex Meliones Pepperdine sophomore from North Carolina has visited many hospitals with McMahon.
” It feels like you’re not doing anything but to them [the children] it’s so much Meliones said of her experience volunteering for Miracle Mondays.
Meliones recalls an experience she had with a 7-year-old boy whose roommate was being discharged from the hospital. The two boys had become very close and when the young boy’s roommate left he was happy for him, but upset at the same time. Meliones was there to comfort him.
Meliones discovered Miracle Mondays through McMahon’s Facebook. He began using the organization’s website as his Facebook status update every Monday. Alex saw the status updates, questioned McMahon about it and then immediately got involved with Miracle Mondays.
The Pepperdine freshman enjoyed working with McMahon back home in North Carolina, and got the idea to bring it to the West Coast.
Meliones has been diligently working with McMahon this semester to create a chapter in Los Angeles based at Pepperdine. The new chapter would work with Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. Meliones and McMahon have already been to the hospital and are now just working on logistical details. Once these have been ironed, Miracle Mondays will be up and running on the West Coast.
Many Pepperdine students have already shown interest in the Miracle Mondays chapter here in Los Angeles. Pepperdine professor Dr. Mike Jordan has volunteered to be the academic advisor for the club.
Meliones passed out Valentine’s Day cards in the Pepperdine cafeteria about Miracle Mondays and had an overwhelming amount of students wanting to help.
Meliones said the process of starting up the club is a marathon, not a race, and step-by-step she is putting all of the pieces together.
When asked about her hopes for the club, Meliones stated her goal simply. Ideally it help kids to not hate hospitals so much.”