Felix Festa Middle School Hat Day For Cancer

The story behind the Heavenly Hats Foundation

In 2001 10 year 10-year-old Anthony Leanna of Green Bay, WI, was on spring break from school and decided to go to local businesses, put collection boxes out, and collect new hats for cancer patients after his grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer. When Anthony started collecting the new hats, it was meant to be a small community service project that would last for a few weeks. He would collect the latest hats, deliver them to the local hospitals, and we thought that would be the end of it.  Well, that wasn't quite how it ended up.  The local news stations got hold of his project, and then it was sent to the Associated Press.  To make a long story short, we ended up having interviews with Lou Dobbs, Good Morning America, The Early Show, Fox News, CNN, Oprah, and the list goes on. Semi trucks were dropping off pallets of hats in Anthony’s driveway.  Anthony’s mom, DeeAnn, made a difficult decision to leave her job and enter the non-profit sector so that Anthony could keep his Heavenly Hats Foundation and his dream of keeping alive the idea of providing hats to every patient who needed them.

It is now 24 years later, and with the help of many volunteers, the Heavenly Hats Foundation has donated over 5,700,000 brand-new hats to cancer patients of all ages around the United States. Heavenly Hats is the only nonprofit organization in the United States that donates (new hats, tags on) to cancer patients of all ages and genders, free of charge, including all shipping charges.  Most of our headwear is donated by large hat companies that provide us with their end-of-season stock; clubs, groups, or individuals donate some.  All of our fundraisers are to raise money to ship the hats to individual patients and hospitals free of charge.  Any individual who requests a "hat package" from us receives 6-7 brand new hats, and the children also get a stuffed animal or toy in their box.  An individual box of hats costs us approximately $15.00-$35.00 to ship, and a large box of hats to a hospital costs us roughly $70.00-$250.00. The cancer patients who receive our hat packages are already facing challenging times, so we want these packages to be completely free to patients in need. It has been a tough few years, but we are still hanging in there and providing all of our hat packages free of all charges, including shipping.

I hope this gives you a little perspective on our foundation, and we greatly appreciate any support you can provide.