Eight years after opening on Grand Rapids’ east side, the Children’s Healing Center plans to relocate to a new home adjacent to the Calvin University campus.
The nonprofit Children’s Healing Center has acquired a building from Calvin University and plans an extensive renovation that’s scheduled to begin after Labor Day.
The $8.5 million project at a more accessible site at 1580 East Beltline Ave. SE will nearly double Children’s Healing Center’s space from 8,000 square feet at the existing facility on Fulton Street, which it leases from St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Parish and School. The center plans to move into its new 15,000-square-foot home before the end of 2024.
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“We are outgrowing our current space and have wait lists for programs and members that want to use our center,” said founder and CEO Amanda Barbour. “It will allow us to better provide a variety of services to our families.”
Children’s Healing Center provides a safe, clean place for children, adolescents, teenagers and young adults with cancer, autoimmune disorders or other medical conditions to play, learn and socialize. Barbour estimates the center has provided children more than 1.7 million minutes of play time since 2015.
She created and opened Children’s Healing Center in the fall of 2015. The center served about 30 families in its first year and has grown to serve more than 300 in the last year. Yearly visits to the Fulton Street location have increased from 500 in the first year to 6,000 last year, Barbour said.
Most of the children and families who use Children’s Healing Center come from West Michigan and markets such as Lansing, Kalamazoo and Traverse City. Some have come from as far away as Detroit and Ann Arbor, where Children’s Healing Center is building a second location in nearby Ypsilanti that’s expected to open next spring.
To finance the new Grand Rapids facility, Children’s Healing Center has quietly raised $5.5 million, including a $2 million appropriation in the state’s 2022 fiscal year budget that “helped jumpstart the project” and allowed the organization to acquire the building by the Calvin University campus and nature preserve, Barbour said.
Lead contributors to the capital campaign include the Steve and Amy Van Andel Foundation, the Doug and Maria DeVos Foundation, and the Jandernoa Foundation of Mike and Sue Jandernoa.
Children’s Healing Center has requests to prospective benefactors that collectively total about $2 million, Barbour said.
The new home will include a half gym for fitness and group classes, sports activities and other programs; an expanded Exploratory Play for children; an art and snack room; dedicated space for teens and young adults for group activities and games; and community spaces for parents that will include a café, lounge and counseling room.
Ada-based Erhardt Construction Co. serves as the construction manager for the project, which was designed by Kalamazoo-based Diekema Hamann Architecture & Engineering LLC.
Barbour created Children’s Healing Center after she graduated from the University of Michigan and was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While undergoing treatment, she had an idea to help other people in similar situations who later had to isolate for an extended period and avoid public places to prevent getting sick when their immune systems were compromised.
Barbour eventually wants Children’s Healing Center to expand beyond the Grand Rapids and Ypsilanti locations.
“We would love to have our services be easily accessible to kids all across Michigan,” she said.
Children’s Healing Center offers services for free and operates on a $1.7 million annual budget that’s funded primarily through philanthropy.
The business model could change under a pilot program with Priority Health. Now in year three, the pilot is determining how well or better children heal and recover by having a clean place to play, socialize and learn after undergoing treatment for cancer or another complex illness that leaves them with a compromised immune system.
Providing a better healing environment can help to keep children healthy as they recover and reduce setbacks that would occur if they were to catch a cold, which leads to fewer doctor and ER visits and cost savings, Barbour said. If the pilot validates that notion, Priority Health would begin paying Children’s Healing Center as part of a child’s treatment and recovery, she said.
Data so far from the pilot show that children at Children’s Healing Center are 28% less likely to have an unplanned inpatient hospital stay, generating $3,439 in savings per child, while hospital inpatient admissions declined 31% for a cost savings of $5,416 per child.
In announcing the pilot in 2021, Priority Heath President Praveen Thadani said the health plan wanted to test a reimbursement model that includes the “critical and transformative emotional and social care” that Children’s Healing Center provides.
“This unique partnership is representative of the innovation necessary to ensure that all our members have the ability to live their best lives,” said Shannon Wilson, a Children’s Healing Center board member and vice president of population health and health equity at Priority Health, said in an email to Crain’s Business Grand Rapids. “The COVID-19 epidemic highlighted the devastating effects of loneliness. Play is important, especially for children. The preliminary results of our partnership demonstrate improved mental and social outcomes, coupled with reductions in medical spend. This expansion means that even more youth in our community will benefit from play.”
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