Although we were forced to cancel our in-person programming, TTFF immediately responded to the needs of the children we serve in new and creative ways.

Thanks to the support of so many, here’s a snapshot of what we accomplished this year:

Urgent Need Fund/Team KC
Shifting funding to our Urgent Need Fund and Team KC, TTFF fulfilled 468 requests in 2020 for families in urgent need due to their child’s illness. By far, the largest request we had this year was for groceries. The need for basic life necessities and medical supplies that insurance does not cover was greater than we’ve experienced in our 30-year history.

In addition, we helped fulfill wish lists for children admitted to local hospitals. To help pass the time and create some joy during a time of medical crisis, we sent items like art and craft kits, children learning kits, Paw Patrol toys, coloring books, Disney and Marvel figurines, board games, “sports” balls (e.g. soccer, football, etc.), Hot Wheel boxes with cars, infant learning toys and more than 400 Lego sets.

Equine Therapy
Even though we weren’t able to host kids at camp, our equine therapy partner Reins in Motion could resume operations. TTFF provided a grant that allowed nearly 1,000 at-risk and developmentally delayed children to experience the therapeutic aspects of horseback riding.

Sophie’s Place (Music Therapy)
“Music is helping me,” proclaimed one child seen by TTFF music therapists in the pediatric unit at John Muir Hospital. She had been nervous and somewhat suspicious of hospital staff, but once the music started, she grew more comfortable, sharing her story with our music therapist and taking part in the music making herself. By the end of the session, she was smiling, giggling and seemed to be in much better spirits. Besides helping to sooth pediatric patients on the spot, the more positivity we can bring to a child’s experience in the hospital, the more likely they are to get the care they need as an adult.

To date, our music therapy partner, The Pacific Resiliency Center, provided services to 183 participants.

Project Organic Produce
We provided organic produce for 202 children in northern California. 

Virtual Camp
While hard to imagine creating a virtual camp program via zoom, to help ease some disappointment surrounding the cancellation of our residential camp program, our interns got in front of the camera and created 82 videos! These encompassed 24 camp related activities, 18 arts and crafts demos, 4 dance and yoga videos, 27 recipes featuring camp favorites, and 9 music therapy videos.  All of these videos are available for anyone to enjoy through our website here.

Barry Taylor Scholarship Fund
The Barry Taylor Scholarship Fund was awarded to four students to further their education at local universities and vocational schools.

We want to give thanks to all those who partnered with us this year and over the past 30 years. We look forward to continuing our good work together in the new year.

Back in the late 1980s, after reading Elizabeth Glaser’s book, In the Absence of Angels, Elaine felt compelled to focus the Taylor’s fundraising activities towards supporting HIV/AIDS kids who fell through the cracks. Barry and Elaine attended an Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation fundraising event to see if they would be a good fit, and found themselves to be the only non-celebrities there. After meeting with Glaser, they decided that the foundation’s mission, which was to find a cure for AIDS, didn’t resonate with Elaine’s desire to provide services for Pediatric AIDS patients.  

After returning from that fundraiser, Elaine picked up the phone, calling at least 10 hospitals in the Bay Area. She kept getting referred to Children’s Hospital Oakland (CHO). When she called CHO, the switchboard connected her with Michaele O’Leary BSN, who was the HIV Coordinator. After learning what Elaine wanted to do, she connected her with Ann Petru MD Director of the HIV/AIDS Program.

The relationship almost ended right there. Elaine didn’t want the money to go to the hospital, but to go towards providing services for the kids. The hospital didn’t know how to make that work. After some discussion, they came to an agreement, and the hospital set up an account that Petru, who was treating hundreds of Bay Area children with HIV/AIDS at CHO, would manage.

Fast forward to 2020, and like TTFF, Petru, now Director of Infectious Diseases, finds herself embroiled in another pandemic. While COVID has mostly spared children, the hardships that families are enduring because of the pandemic, like housing and food insecurity, directly threatens the kids in our communities.  TTFF hunkered down this year to help those families with medically fragile kiddos maneuver these threatening situations.

The Taylor Family Foundation’s (TTFF) co-founder Barry Taylor’s passing left a huge hole in our hearts in those of everyone he touched. When the time came for TTFF to honor his legacy, it seemed fitting to go back to his roots. Born in 1938 and raised in Northern California, Barry lived the American dream. He got his provisional driver’s license at 14 so he could get a job to help support his family. In 1972, he founded Taylor Made Copy Systems with $7,000 in borrowed capital.  By 1980, Taylor Made was a multi-million dollar company with 220 employees providing copiers and service to corporations in four different counties.

A self-made man, Barry believed there are no limits to what a young person could achieve when given a helping hand. TTFF established the Barry Taylor Scholarship Fund (BTSF) in 2018 to assist young people, youth at-risk and foster children who exhibit strong character and work ethic to not only enrich their own lives but also the lives of others. BTSF provides future self-made women and men of Northern California with the opportunity to further their education with scholarships available for students at a junior college, tech school, vocational school or four-year college.  For more information, email TTFF@ttff.org.

Having fun at camp is a must, but at The Taylor Family Foundation (TTFF), we know that to keep energy levels up we need to fuel our campers with healthy and delicious food.  While we have always put careful thought into menu preparation for each of our camper groups, in 2018, we took that a step further with help from a grant from Wells Fargo. With so many of our kiddos dealing with compromised immune systems and/or special dietary needs, we launched Project Organic Produce (POP) and began transitioning to an organic fresh produce kitchen.

With the goal of ensuring children consume fewer toxins and pesticide residue and benefit from increased nutrients while here at camp, we are excited by the success we have experienced so far. We’ve been able to utilize our existing relationships within the local agricultural community to create a clean and healthy foundation for adventure, carefree fun and friendship one organic fruit and veggie at a time. We’re happy to support farmers by purchasing locally grown organic fruits and vegetables when available and to give back to the local community that has been so generous to us for decades.

Elaine Taylor remembers when she first met Merl Saunders, Jr.  Michael Vosse was the ABC7 producer setting up to do a feature on Camp Sunburst, the HIV/AIDS camp, when Elaine did her “ride along” with Cheryl Jennings. After they returned, Vosse connected Elaine with Saunders, who at the time was working at Gibson Guitar in Oakland and a board member of Music in Schools Today (MuST).  It was Elaine’s passionate plea for donations for The Taylor Family Foundation’s annual Day in the Park (DITP) fundraiser that sealed the deal, getting Saunders involved in the foundation.

Saunders took a guitar off the wall and asked his friend, music historian Dennis McNally, who had interviewed Jerry Garcia countless times, to get the Grateful Dead to sign the guitar for TTFF. At first McNally protested, but he eventually agreed and worked his magic. About a week after receiving the guitar, Elaine was watching the news and heard that Garcia had died, making that instrument one of the last pieces of memorabilia signed by Garcia.

Out of respect, the following year Grateful Dead band member Bob Weir came to DITP and explained the story of the guitar and it was auctioned off, raising $35,000.  In an amazing act of charity, the buyer donated it back to be auctioned off again, raising another $25,000.

That guitar was just the beginning of a lasting relationship between Merl Saunders, Jr and TTFF. He brought his love of the foundation with him when new opportunities arose. When he worked with the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, he put together a live auction package featuring tickets to the Grammy Awards plus admission to the exclusive pre-telecast before the show and the member’s only after-party that was only available to nominees, raising well over $100,000 over the course of the next four years. To sweeten the package, TTFF supporter Joe Tomkinson flew the highest bidders to and from Los Angeles in his private plane. 

Elaine reflects, “Merl has been a Champion Ambassador for TTFF.  By connecting the dots of friends and colleagues who knew both of us, we created a triple decade friendship of compassion and caring for those who needed a kind heart and hand of help!”

Did You Know:
Saunders’ father played piano and keyboards professionally and had collaborated with Jerry Garcia in the early 1970s. He sat in with the Grateful Dead and played live concerts with Garcia, as well as Tom Fogerty, Sheila E. and Mickey Hart. It was the senior Saunders who helped Garcia relearn how to play the guitar after he had suffered a diabetic coma.

Dennis McNally’s wife, Susana Millman, has photographed Day in the Park for more than two decades. Her credits include work for Arista Records, Rhino Records, BBC, Grateful Dead Productions, Oracle, Rolling Stone, TIME, and the NY Times among others. We are so lucky to have her capture memories year after year.

Although he admired the work the foundation was doing and was blown away by all of Barry and  Elaine Taylor’s accomplishments in such a short time, Ken Monnens wasn’t moved by our original logo, which has become irreverently known as the “swiss miss” logo. A supporter of The Taylor Family Foundation (TTFF) and Day in the Park attendee from the Lafayette days, Ken offered to donate the services of his design team at Ken Creative to brand TTFF properly.

After getting the go-ahead, Ken and his team met with Barry and Elaine to formally hear their vision for the organization and go over the foundation’s mission and values. Ken’s team presented a broad array of options and as a group, they selected what we now fondly refer to as our “three kids” logo.

The logo encompasses all that is TTFF. It depicts diverse children holding hands to represent community. Their gaze is positioned as if to look up at our donors, thanking them for their support. And importantly, the logo’s bold lines and cheerful color are easy to reproduce on t-shirts, caps, visors, tote bags and a variety of other fun SWAG! 

Ken Creative’s logo has served us well for more than 25 years and goes on all our marketing materials. While we’ve done some fun iterations of it for anniversaries and special events, the identity that Ken’s team created back when the foundation was still in its early days continues to be the cornerstone of our identity.

About a decade later, in the mid-2000s, TTFF’s Program Coordinator at the time, Molly Huber, drew a stick figure of a camper with floaties and goggles. It was the birth of “Timmy” our iconic representative camper. Timmy made his way onto many marketing materials in his cute swim trunks and goggles that the team at Janet Fazio Advertising was designing. But when we needed gift tags for a holiday project, it didn’t seem right to have Timmy in a swim outfit. This was the beginning of outfitting Timmy in many fun ways. While “Winter Timmy” was in snow gear, we’ve had banker Timmy, butler Timmy and golfer Timmy. When we started adding a musical component to Day in the Park, we created a Timmy to represent the guest artist.

After years of being an only child, we decided it was time to expand and Timmy welcomed a sister named Tammy! Now we could have all sorts of fun with these two icons who came to represent the children we serve. Timmy and Tammy continue to make their way into our marketing materials and on camper t-shirts. There’s even a coloring book with the two having adventures at Camp Arroyo.