Make-A-Wish Mississippi

Founded in 1984, The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Mississippi's mission is Together, we create life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses. Fulfilling a child's wish provides a joyful and meaningful experience that benefits both the child and the family. The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Mississippi has granted more than 1,100 wishes since its founding. For many of these children, a wish experience provides strength and hope for the future.

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We are a part of a National Organization who provides constant training and staff development opportunities. We require the staff at our chapter to stay up to date on all staff development, attend trainings in their core area and create a comradery between other like positions from other chapters. Key staff attend a National conference each year to further development as a National team.

We partner with many of our corporate donors to host wish reveals for wish children. This gives them awareness and first hand experience seeing the impact of their gift. Most of our wishes are granted by volunteers. They have regularly scheduled meetings and trainings to make sure the mission is carried out uniformly and effectively. Our board is very active and plays a big role in suggesting new efforts that they see working in their own companies or other organizations they are a part of. We do many fundraising activities through social media, have a constant presence on social media outlets of current events and wishes taking place and ask that our corporate partners share these posts to help reach a broader audience.

A big part of granting a wish is the wish reveal. This is normally hosted by a company as an in person party. During COVID-19, we could not do that in person. So, we had drive by wish reveals. We asked for people in the wish child's community to each decorate their vehicle. The wish child would be set up in a certain spot and everyone would drive by, honk, deliver gifts through car windows ultimately announcing their wish had been granted. It really pull the whole community together for the child in a way that had not happened before. Now that it is safer to have in person events, we still go back to this community experience because of the impact it had on the child and their family.