Volunteers in Salt Lake City are designing and building custom Halloween costumes for kids with physical differences. Every kid knows how important it is to find the right Halloween costume, but for the ones who need their wheelchair or walker to get around, that can be especially difficult. So to help those kids out, a group of volunteers at Shriners Children’s Salt Lake City are working with children with physical differences and their families to design and build custom costumes that work for them.
Every Halloween, the volunteers spend weeks designing, engineering and sourcing materials for costumes for local kids who use wheelchairs or walkers. Director of Marketing and Communications for Shriners Children’s Salt Lake City, Dawn Wright, says the volunteers are like a pit crew, working together to create Halloween magic. "We are helping more than 40 children this Halloween get to be whatever they want,” Wright says.
At the end of the design and build phase, the kids all line up and parade their new costumes for the crowd of volunteers and family. Where before there were a bunch of kids in wheelchairs, now there’s a princess in her carriage, an Ewok in a treehouse, a cowgirl in a covered wagon, a velociraptor in a Jurassic Park Jeep, and a Baby Yoda in his floating pod. But what the families noticed more than the costumes were the huge smiles on the kids’ faces.