HISTORY

Wonder Connection is a grant and donor funded program. The program used to be known as Healing and Hope Through Science.

Founder Katie Stoudemire was a volunteer at several different children’s hospitals during and after college. She recognized that hospitalized children and adolescents experience pain, fear, boredom, and isolation from peers as well as almost complete isolation from the natural world.  Katie always loved being outside and figured that if she was hospitalized, she’d want a way to engage her mind and connect to nature.  With the hospital’s permission, Katie started bringing natural objects with her to the hospital and was amazed at the positive results. After several years of fundraising, Wonder Connection was founded in 2006 with a small discretionary grant from the Oak Foundation. 

Wonder Connection transitioned on 2/15/19 from being a program of the North Carolina Botanical Garden to being a fiscally sponsored program of the non-profit SEE. This move allows Wonder Connection a greater degree of autonomy, allowing us to sustain the growth that we experienced in the past few years.

As a fiscal sponsor, SEE is a tax-exempt umbrella organization that provides nonprofit status and administrative services to small programs like Wonder Connection that fall under their mission. While the wording ‘fiscal sponsor’ might lead you to believe we get funding from them, we actually pay them a small fee to provide oversight and guidance, as well as HR, admin, finance and accounting services to Wonder Connection.  This allows Wonder Connection to have tax exempt status while devoting our energy to our mission-driven work and gives us the freedom to fundraise and market our program as we need to in order to grow. SEE’s EIN is 95-4116679.

We serve pediatric patients and child and adolescent psychiatric patients at UNC Children’s Hospitals and we serve local outpatients and families at the Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill.

Wonder Connection’s science programming increases patients’ science knowledge, provides patients with joy, and acts as an inspiration for their futures. The natural science activities are patient-centered and focus on empowering patients by giving them the opportunity to make choices and be creative.