2022 Season Charities

LiyanaStrong Foundation

“The LiyanaStrong Foundation creates a fun-filled experience for children through providing toys, games and activities along with transforming hospitals from white and sterile into fun, colorful and interactive spaces to allow for a positive experience for patients and their families! Many hospitals have helped me and I want to give back knowing first-hand the impact my mission has on the patients.” – Liyana Hunter

The LiyanaStrong Foundation was founded by now 16 year old Liyana.

Her vision for the foundation came from frequent long-term admissions at quite a few children’s hospitals across the country.

She observed most of the hospital playrooms had games or puzzles missing pieces, a limited variety of things to do that spanned from infants to teens, and often a sole popular video game disk that was requested by many kiddos on the unit.

Her mission is to fill the playrooms with amazing exciting activities, games and toys to create a fun-filled hospital experience for children battling epilepsy and other neurological disorders. Over the last few years, her vision has expanded to transforming dull, sterile, white wall hospital rooms to fun, colorful and interactive spaces that lift every child’s spirits who stay in them!

To learn more about the LiyanaStrong Foundation, please visit their website: https://www.theliyanastrongfoundation.org/

Burkman Foundation

We started the Burkman Foundation this year to provide scholarship opportunities for young adults ages 16-24 with a cognitive disability living through the struggles of navigating their way through early adulthood. It is our goal to help educate and provide resources to these individuals and hopefully lift some burdens during this process.

The “Burkman Foundation” is officially open and ready to hand out scholarships in 2023. This has been a dream of ours for many years and it took a lot of hard work and persistence to make this happen. We will be giving out multiple scholarships to two different levels of recipients:

1. Senior Level – to High School youth and College (up to 24) with cognitive disabilities to attend technical/trade schools, 2-4 year accredited colleges, or online college programs.

2. Junior Level – for ages 16-20 with cognitive disabilities to attend adult living skill classes or camps to prepare them for independent living.

Watching our two high functioning autistic sons navigate adulthood has made us realize the need for additional resources they need after they turn 18. One of our goals is to also establish programs that will help build adult social circles for individuals with cognitive disabilities such as group outings, relationship coaching/advisors, living skill classes (cooking cleaning, arts/crafts, how to use simple tools, etc.). With this 501c status, this opens us up to year-round fund raising and not just what we receive during the holiday season.

There will be a website coming soon.