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Making fun contagious for children in the hospital

As a kid, Grant Prather spent many days in the hospital. Now he lifts the spirits of sick kids by delivering boxes filled with puzzles, games and art supplise.

Photo: The Big Fun Box

Grant Prather knows what it’s like to spend endless days in the sterile environment of a hospital room surrounded by tubes and treatment trays. Prather, 26, was born with cystic fibrosis (CF), a debilitating disease that can progress to a systemic failure of the lungs, liver, pancreas and intestines. At one point, the doctors told his parents to prepare for his funeral. Although there’s no cure for CF, Grant pulled through, but relied on an oxygen tank to breathe until his double lung transplant in 2000. Now he’s done things he never dreamed possible, such as going to college, driving, running and bringing kids in hospitals a chance to have fun through his non-profit, The Big Fun Box.

“My life was lots of doctors and hospitals. I missed playing with friends and I missed a lot of school,” Prather says. “But when I played a game or drew a picture or put together a puzzle, I didn’t think about how sick I was.” With his mother, Jo Anne McKinney, he decided to share those lighthearted distractions with other chronically hospitalized children and their families by putting them together in a kit.

In Prather’s hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he, his mother and a team of volunteers fill thousands of fire engine red boxes with puzzles, games, playing cards, art supplies and even a squeezable anti-stress toy, aimed at kids aged 7 to 12. Each one includes something for the hospital staff as well: thank-you cards that can be decorated and designed by the pediatric patient. Boxes are delivered to the patient’s room free, thanks to grants and donations. Sometimes the effects are immediately clear. Prather recalls delivering a Box to a room where a mother was lying on a cot by her son’s bed, the father nearby, both at wit’s end from trying to get their son to cheer up. “When he saw the Box with his name on it, he sat up and smiled,” he says. “His parents said he hadn’t smiled all day. He couldn’t wait to see what was inside.”

In the two years since the project started, 6,000 Big Fun Boxes have gone to 41 hospitals in 26 states and the District of Columbia. “Finding ways to have fun pulled us through some awful times,” says Prather, now undergoing chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer. “It was therapeutic. We were laughing even when others weren’t.”