Our Fall Grant Cycle Opens September 1st — And Here's What That Really Means
When I started WolfPups, I wasn't thinking about grant cycles or application windows or review processes. I was thinking about the families I knew that were sitting in the same place we had sat, staring at a denial letter or a therapy invoice or a piece of equipment their child desperately needed, trying to figure out how they were going to make it happen. I was thinking about how hard it had been for us even with a reasonable amount of resources.
I'm an APRN and a healthcare quality and safety leader. I (mostly) understand insurance and I definitely know clinical context. I know how to write an appeal letter, how to push back on an insurance denial, how to ask the right questions in the right rooms and how to push on levers to force response…AND this has still been one of the hardest things our family has ever navigated. So when I think about the families who don't have what we have — the clinical background, the support system, the free time to write the appeal, I feel a deep sense of responsibility to try to help.
This year we changed the way we ask questions on our application and I want to be transparent about why. We are not asking who needs the most money or who has the best story. We are asking where the biggest gap exists between what a child needs and what their family can realistically access. Those are two very different questions, and the distinction matters enormously to us.
In previous grant cycles, we did not ask about financial and insurance particulars but this time we are and that’s because we recognize that financial circumstances matter. I know that income alone doesn't tell the whole story and my family is a perfect example of that. Two families can make the same amount of money and have completely different access to care because of geography, because of insurance, because of whether a parent had to leave the workforce to provide care, because of how much debt they've already taken on just to get their child what was clinically necessary. We ask about insurance because having insurance doesn't always mean having access and access to publically funded insurance varies significantly from state to state. This, compounded by the fact that therapy is often denied, benefits can be significantly limited, or a deductible can be impossible to meet, makes asking about insurance the responsible thing to do.
We ask what happens if a family doesn't receive a grant because we know that sometimes waiting isn't neutral. A child may be outgrowing equipment or a therapy opportunity may only be available right now. We want to understand why now matters, because for a lot of families, it really does. And we ask about impact because the most important thing we want to understand is what changes for a child if we can say yes. Does this mean more independence, increased mobility., a voice through a communication device that didn't exist before? These are not abstract outcomes. They are the real lives of real children and they are exactly why we do this work.
We know that asking for help takes courage and that filling out an application when you are already exhausted from fighting for your child is one more thing on a list that never seems to get shorter and we don't take that lightly. Every application we receive is read with care and we every child behind it is seen. Thanks for trusting us with your story. It means the world to us.