Angela's House
Coordination of Complex Home Care Services and Residential Services for Medically Fragile Children

In the News » Newsletter

Spring 2008 Edition
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Message from the Executive Director Bob Policastro

You will see a change on our front cover that will become our new identity into the future. We will be taking out Association for Technology Dependent Children (ATDC) from our name. The legal works to make this change is underway.

I felt it would be important to explain how we came to this decision. The term "Technology Dependent Children" was created over 20 years ago to medically describe and categorize children with special health care needs. This term was meant to simplify the difficult overall description of the hundreds and thousands of rare diseases, illness and accident-related medical conditions. At the time it was easier to use this term to help describe the children.

When we first chose to use this term for the name of our non-profit agency, we felt it would become well recognized in the community. Unfortunately, the use of this term was reduced by both our federal and state governments. By the time the first Angela's House opened in 2000, we saw how well received it was and we also saw that people in the community knew us more from Angela's House than from ATDC. We decided at that point to use both names to describe ATDC for our home care services and Angela's House for our home-away-from-home alternative for children. Over the past seven years, the term "Technology Dependent Children" was not used and Angela's House became more familiar to people.

The decision was made and is underway to change our name to Angela's House. All of our services will remain the same. We will continue to support parents caring for their children at home and we will continue to offer out-of-home alternatives for children that can no longer live with their parents. We understand that we are still faced with the enormity of trying to explain to our community which children we work with. Our best description is to say we work with children with special health care needs that are medically fragile, chronically ill or living with a life threatening illness.

We found a home for the Angel of Hope statue to memorialize all children that have passed. We are working with Marine Veteran Pat Cassetta and Nassau County to erect the statue in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. For more information, please visit http://www.angelashouse.org/angelofhope.shtml

 

Thanks to Our Supporters


Something for Seniors group from St. Patrick´s RC Church of Smithtown made pillows and blankets for the children

Bob and Angie Policastro stand with 17-year old Chris Buckley who decorated his parent´s house and built a large ginger bread house for people to give donations to Angela's House

The student government from Forest Brook Elementary Schools visited Angela's House to do yard work and hang birdhouses they had made

The Smithtown Rotary Sunrise held a fund rasier where some of the proceeds went to help Angela's House

Wal-Mart made a donation and their employees made baskets for the children

Girl Scout Troop 3837 made gifts and delivered them to Angela's House

 

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