Since it opened in 1979, the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford (RMHS) has provided a home-away-from-home for hundreds of families each year who travel outside their communities to access treatment for their critically ill children at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Over the past several years, the facility has undergone a massive transformation to add a new building and refurbish existing spaces so it can accommodate more families than ever before. The project concluded this week with the “grand reopening” of its 44,000-square-foot legacy building, the Taube Family Center, making the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford the largest of the world’s 337 Houses.
Last year, the Ronald McDonald House celebrated the opening of the Arillaga Family Center, a brand-new building that added overnight accommodations for 67 families. Together with the newly refurbished Taube Family Center, which underwent a year-long renovation to add nine bedrooms to the original 47 rooms, the combined 96,000-square-foot facility will operate as one campus with space for 123 families each night. Families in need will begin moving into the newly refurbished space in early June.
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony held on Thursday, May 25, to mark the grand reopening, David Rosenthal, MD, director of the Pediatric Heart Failure Program at Packard Children’s, and board member of RMHS said: “What Ronald McDonald House at Stanford offers to our patients’ families is marvelous because it lightens their burden and allows them to focus on getting their child healthier and out of the hospital as quickly as possible. I applaud our community for rising up to meet the challenges of this expansion, enabling us to help eliminate RMHS’s nightly waiting list of families who need a place to stay during such a vulnerable time in their lives.”
“It truly took a village of incredible supporters in our community to build and create this new campus,” said Annette Eros, CEO of Ronald McDonald House at Stanford, in a press release. “From our generous donors and amazing partners to our awesome and talented volunteers and staff, we owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who has contributed their time, money and effort to create an oasis of hope and love for more families in need.”
The expansion of RMHS is expected to ease the House’s current nightly waiting list for families and will help accommodate additional demand resulting from the new hospital, which is expected to open in December 2017.
