Beth sits down with the always delightful Marie Kuck (from Nathaniel’s Hope), who has a special invitation for our listeners for a behind-the-scenes tour of Make ‘m Smile in Orlando.
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Beth Golik: Hello friends, welcome to Key Ministry, the podcast. This is Beth Golik, one of your co-hosts, and I'm so excited because I am here talking with my friend Marie Kuck from Nathaniel's Hope. And you know what? She just prayed over this podcast meeting and I'm just really excited to have this opportunity to catch up with her, introduce you to her, and learn a little bit more about some pretty exciting things that are coming up next month. As our listeners probably know, Disability & The Church, our big national conference is happening in Orlando May 1st through 3rd, and Nathaniel's Hope is a big part of that. So ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Marie Kuck. And Marie, if you could tell us a little bit about Nathaniel's Hope and your story, we can't wait to hear.
Marie Kuck: I'd love to do that. Beth, thank you. We're so excited that you all are coming to Orlando just shortly here. But Nathaniel's Hope we're based in Orlando, Florida, but Nathaniel's Hope started because of a little boy named Nathaniel who came into our lives about 26 years ago, which is so hard to believe was that far along. And Nathaniel, our son, was born with multiple disabilities. He kind of brought us into the whole community that we weren't prepared to be a part of, but for four and a half years, we had the joy and challenge and opportunity of investing in him and having him here on Earth as our son. And then he had a change of address and moved to heaven at age four and a half. And afterwards we felt like God said to us this wasn't the end, it was the beginning, but he wanted us to steward our journey with our son.
And as a result, we began a ministry called Nathaniel's Hope. Our mission is to cheer on and celebrate kids of all ages or kids and adults with disabilities who we call our VIPs, folks with value and incredible purpose as well as educate and equip particularly the church, the community, but also particularly the church with tools and programs to assist and enrich the lives of special needs families. And so that we've been serving, doing this now for 22 years and have four core programs that we do. We've got a birthday club, a VIP birthday club that we've got kids and adults from all 50 states and eight countries in, and we send cards and bears kind of just trying to celebrate life with them. We have a respite program called Buddy Break that we partner with churches around the country to provide free respite care. And I really feel like that's a great tool for churches.
At Christmas time, we have a toy shop that we partner with families to try and just hold their arms up and bring joy and support at Christmas. Of course, everything we do is with the hope of Christ, bringing the hope of Christ and then Make 'm Smile is our big festival coming up that I guess we'll be talking about a little bit here, but it's a big celebration of our VIP friends. Then lastly, our newest project is we're building a community called HOPETOWN, a live, work and play community to serve kids and adults with disabilities and their families. But ultimately it's to address the concern and the opportunity of what's going to happen when caregivers can no longer care for their loved ones. And so HOPETOWN is our solution to that, by God's Grace.
Beth Golik: So many amazing things. I mean, a lot of people I think know you because of Buddy Break, but so many incredible things happening. Yes, through God's grace for sure. And we're going to put links in the show notes to all of this information because I think people are going to want to check out HOPETOWN and watch the video on the vision for HOPETOWN. And so lots of really incredible things happening in this past 22 years and more. So Marie, if you could tell us a little bit more about Make 'm Smile. I think it's hard to comprehend the magnitude of this event. So tell us a little bit about that and then I'd like you to fill us in on some special things that attendees of Disability and the Church next month will get to do because of the partnership between Key Ministry and Nathaniel's Hope.
Marie Kuck: Oh, I'm so excited, but I am so excited that we're working together and you're bringing the conference to Orlando, Florida. It's, first of all, who doesn't want to come to Orlando...
Beth Golik: I have to mention it's snowing in Cleveland today.
Marie Kuck: I have to mention it's 80 degrees here and sun-shiny. But anyway, but we're just thrilled to be able to be kind of bringing these two events together. So Make 'm Smile started because our son's birthday, Nathaniel was June 6th, and we could no longer do a birthday party for him. So when his first birthday rolled around, we just said, what could we do kind of in his memory and his honor just to kind of remember him. And we said, well, we can't really celebrate his life anymore. I mean, he's up in heaven, he's celebrating with Jesus, but let's just celebrate life and let's celebrate all kids with disabilities. And so our first event began 22 years ago here in downtown Orlando at Lake Eola, and it was a very grassroots attempt to reach out to families and to love on them and just have a great day of blessing and provide resources and fun.
And we had about 600 people the first year and we just kind of started out grassroots. And through the years we have added to that number in the events. So we secure the entire lake in downtown Orlando and pretty much the lake goes around a mile and around the mile we have all sorts of activities for families to do everything from our fun zone. We'll have about eight bounce houses, and we can literally take kids out of wheelchairs and put them in there. There's games and karaoke, then you move on and we have our health and sports zone, and we have all kinds of sports activities and fun things people can engage in. Then you move on, it's animal land, and this year we're going to have a camel. We've got sloths and llamas and petting zoos and everything. And then you keep moving around and then it's the soak zone and where it's all water slides and water events.
And then we have Autism Alley with resources for families impacted by autism. But we'll have about 125 organizations sprinkled in there that serve the special needs community to kind of inform the community about what's out there to help them. But we have transportation station, we'll have all kinds of cars and vehicles. We've got the Dunkin' Cruiser coming to give coffee out. But real exciting as well, this year we have the Chick-fil-A remote kitchen coming that can make 600 sandwiches an hour, which is amazing. They'll be cooking onsite at location. We've got thousands of hot dogs and all kinds of goodies coming, but it's, the community just comes together to say, we want to celebrate life. We want to celebrate folks of all abilities. But particularly sometimes our community just gets forgotten, gets lost, and this is a day that we come forward and say, we celebrate your life.
On stage, I'm very excited about this. This is brand new breaking news, but on stage we have, throughout the course of the morning, we have a stage entertainment and we highlight people with disabilities what their abilities are on stage, which is really amazing. And we partner with our local Christian radio station, they mc it, but we're so excited to be able to tell you that our special guest this year is going to be Blessing Offor. If you've never heard of him before, Blessing was born in Nigeria with glaucoma in one eye and then moved to the States at a young age to get help and support, and then through a freak accident, lost sight in both eyes. And since then, he has such a gift in music and God has just raised him up in that arena. He was featured on The Voice. He's been nominated for two Grammys. We got to meet him recently. He was opening, he travels with Lauren Daigle and does her opening, but he does a lot of great songs that maybe you don't even realize that he does, but he's going to be on our main stage, and I'm so excited about it because he's excited to come as somebody with a disability that can just celebrate with us and just bring so much hope and joy to our event. So I'm very, very excited about that.
So Make 'm Smile, that's kind of the event. It goes up fast. We set up at night, we have a setup team that sets up pretty much through the night, and the event starts at eight o'clock and finishes at 1:30. We're expecting last year we had over 3,200 people with disabilities there, plus their families. Plus the park tells us over 25,000 people at the event.
So it's a really a fun morning. So we grew a little bit from our first year, but it's just a lot of fun. We have characters, we'll have about 50 characters there. We'll do a character parade that goes around the lake and we shut down a whole street as well. I think they've told us we're the fourth largest event in downtown Orlando. That's amazing. It's really fun. But the greatest thing, we have a lot of fun things, but I think the greatest joy is to see the families that come out and that they feel like they could be themselves and they don't have to apologize for some unique behaviors or they can just be themselves. They can be amongst other people that they can see the vastness of the community around them, but also feel the love and support of those around them.
We really reach out to the local church to come out and to do a buddy stroll, and we partner up families with and without disability together to walk around the lake together and to just partake in friendship together. It's just such a beautiful day. But I think the families, we've been told before that the kids, it's one of their favorite events. We've had one mom tell us that Make 'm Smile was better than Disney World for her kids. That's a lot of fun. So we're excited about Disability & The Church, partnering together as the conference ends at five o'clock on Friday.
And then following that, we're going to have for those who might be interested to say, Hey, I'd like to maybe think about bringing a Make 'm Smile to my community. Now listen, you don't have to have 25,000 people at your event. You can do it on a smaller scale. We've done smaller scale ones, but we're going to have to kind of pull the curtain back and kind of see how the event is put together and talk about the elements of the event. We'll serve dinner and we'll do a private tour around as well. Our setup team, we have about 80 people that will be out there setting up the event, and we'll be doing that Friday night and then Saturday we'll join together and Make 'm Smile. And so we're very, very excited about it. So I'm excited because folks, I mean, pretty much if you're at the conference till five o'clock, it's going to be hard to get a flight out that night. So you're looking at the next day to fly out. So you can actually come to our event in the morning, even from eight to 10, and you can still catch a flight out. You can get to the airport and be on a noon flight at one o'clock flight, two o'clock flight. So you can still be able to visit, but I mean, you're probably going to want to stay for longer than two hours, but you can come and just do it in two hours.
Beth Golik: That's awesome. So disability ministry leaders, I had the chance to walk around Lake Eola with Marie last year, sometime this past year, not during Make 'm Smile, just on a regular day. It's this gorgeous setting. And we were able to walk around the lake a little bit, and I was trying to picture what this looks like with more than 25,000 people having an incredible time. And I've seen the videos, and by the way, we will post links to the video, we will post links to Blessing Offor so that people can get his music, be familiar with his music, but it's going to be so incredible to see this in person, and especially to get this behind the scenes tour on Friday night. So again, that's available at no charge to conference attendees, it's part of the registration. So keyministry.org/datc2024 when you go to register, it's one of the options. And I'm very excited to, I've checked that off on my registration form because I want to be there for the behind the scenes. And as Marie said, this can give ministry leaders an idea of this is something we could do in our community. Again, not at the grand scale that's happening in Orlando and it is happening. I know there's some in California and here in Ohio.
Marie Kuck: Yeah, we've a rural commuter in Hartville, Ohio in a park, beautiful, scaled down incredibly, but the same elements and the same things happening, the same celebrations happening, the love coming together, the love of Christ being spread to a community and really engaging other people to be involved. So we will have one in Hartville, Ohio in July. We'll be doing one in Gastonia, North Carolina in August. And back to Southern California in September. Anyway, it's a doable model though. And the great thing about it's, it includes the whole family We love, we have a whole sib area where we honor the siblings that come and we kind of celebrate them, but it's for the whole family. It's not just for the person with a disability and everything. I was going to mention, everything is free for families that have a member of with a disability. So honestly, it's just such a great opportunity for us to pull together as the body of Christ just to make a difference.
Beth Golik: That's amazing. So Nathaniel's Hope and Marie, they have an incredible team. I mean, their staff is incredible, but they have this incredible team of volunteers as well, and it's going to be exciting for me to see them in action and to see this event take place. Yeah. So that's great.
Marie Kuck: We're excited. We're excited about it. And I mean, honestly, what a great combination to have the conference and Make 'm Smile together. I mean, just so much and people are going to walk away with such full hearts.
Beth Golik: Yes, for sure. For sure. Well, Marie, thank you for taking the time today and to have our listeners learn a little bit more about not just Nathaniel's Hope, but what they can expect that weekend, May 1st through fourth, including Make 'm Smile. So we're just super excited. We're excited to see you in May. We're excited to come to Orlando, and I just thank you for the work that you're doing and for taking the time to tell us about it today.
Marie Kuck: Oh, thank you, Beth. I can't wait to see you.
Beth Golik: Thanks, friends, for joining us today for Key Ministry: The Podcast with our guest Marie Kuck from Nathaniel's Hope. We look forward to seeing Marie and hopefully you at Disability and the Church 2024.
Marie Kuck will be speaking at Disability & the Church 2024. Click here to register for the conference now!
