Since RMHC Central Valley has only 18 bedrooms, our house is at 100% capacity every night, often forcing us to turn away more families than we are able to serve. In an effort to minimize the number of families we turn away, we created the Hotels From the Heart program in 2016. We apply for grants to secure funding that will allow us to use a discounted rate to place families into rooms at our partner hotels, the Hyatt Place and Marriott TownPlace Suites, in Fresno. In 2021, the Hotels From the Heart program was even more valuable to our operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With increasing restrictions surrounding our guest families, we leaned on our hotel partners to be able to quickly help families. If a family just needed to stay near the hospital for only two or three nights for their child to have an outpatient procedure at Valley Children’s, we used our hotel resources to place them in our partner hotels, leaving rooms at RMHC Central Valley available for families who needed to stay with us long-term. We would like to thank The Fansler Foundation for investing in the mission of RMHC Central Valley by generously donating to this program.
Through the Hotels From the Heart program, we were able to serve 89 families in 2021; which provided 200 nights for short-term stays.