18 Oct Exciting news: RMHCDC is expanding!
In four decades of service to the Greater Washington, DC community, we have proudly served more than 19,580 families at our Ronald McDonald Houses.
Now, we are growing to help even more!
Over the years, RMHCDC has grown exponentially to better serve the needs of families who come to us for assistance.
Starting with one 16-bedroom house in 1980, we have since expanded our services to include two Ronald McDonald Houses with a total of 32 bedrooms, three Ronald McDonald Family Rooms, and two Ronald McDonald Care Mobiles serving families and children in the District, Maryland and Virginia.
Through these three core programs, we help close to 11,000 children and their families annually.
Even with this progress, every year we are unable to provide aid to a growing number of families, due to our facilities’ limited capacity. Our Ronald McDonald Houses have been forced to turn away 168 families because of a shortage of rooms.
And the demand for rooms is only increasing. Newly opened oncology treatment units and the creation of specialized disease centers at major area hospitals will cause a rapid influx of families in need to our Ronald McDonald Houses over the next 2-3 years.
To serve this growing population, we are renovating both of our Ronald McDonald Houses to help even more families in need of a safe, supportive, and affordable “home-away-from-home” while their children are undergoing treatment for pediatric illness at nearby hospitals.
Beginning January 2020, we are excited to start construction to expand our Houses and better serve those in need of our care. Our priority is to relieve the immediate pressure of extensive waitlists, while also planning for future growth in the population we serve.
We will increase bedrooms at the Ronald McDonald House of Northern Virginia from 8 guest rooms to 24 guest rooms, and the Ronald McDonald House of Washington, DC will go from 26 to 32 guest rooms. This $5+ million project will better position us to help the 33% of families on our waitlists we are not currently able to accommodate.
In addition to more rooms, we are also re-engineering the heating and cooling of our Houses, and placing a greater emphasis on communal spaces—larger kitchens, better lounges, inviting outdoor spaces, and a significant play space for children and their siblings to forget their illness and enjoy being children. The expansion will also allow for the use of more modern technology to better care for those under our roof.
Special Thank You to our Expansion Partners:
This expansion was completed in early 2021 for both the DC and Northern Virginia Houses.
With more families than ever relying on our services, we hope you will consider supporting our mission by making a donation today.