Alice’s Kids pays for seemingly small items that make significant differences for children whose families can’t afford them.
By Theresa Vargas Theresa Vargas Local columnist who previously wrote for the local enterprise team about poverty, race and people with disabilities. Email Bio Follow Columnist March 20 at 3:32 PM The handwritten letter I found in my office mailbox this week came from a D.C. woman and began with a five-word sentence: “I am disappointed with you.”
Fitzsimmons’s mother, Alice, made him this stuffed dog when he was 5 years old. He says it keeps him “grounded.” Most of that financial help, I noted in that column, benefited children in the D.C. region and some as far as California and Texas. “I’ve been in tears for days,” Executive Director Ron Fitzsimmons said. The generosity, he said, “has changed the face of this charity.”
Fitzsimmons and his sister, Laura Fitzsimmons Peters, came up with the idea for the organization based on their own childhood. Their mother was forced to go on welfare after their father left the family, and they remembered “humiliating” moments of wearing donated clothes and shoes with holes. They also remembered how their mother, Alice, at times would clean houses for extra money and, on those occasions, treat them to something new.
His desk overlooks his backyard, and on a windowsill, directly in front of his laptop, sits a well-worn stuffed dog, with the name “Scrappy” sewn onto its side.
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