Special Holiday Wants-The Family Edition (2016-2021)

In 2016, Special Wants: A Bacon and Juice Boxes Project decided to launch a simple holiday gift exchange to help grant wishes for families who have a special need’s loved one (and their siblings!). We know that it can be expensive to pay for therapies and treatments and wanted to alleviate the financial burden around the holidays for these families. It was completed using a basic excel sheet where people requested wishes, and then other people granted those wishes. It was an amazing success! We granted over 500 wishes that first year!

Since then, we have grown in different ways every single year.

After 6 years (2016-2021) of this Holiday Wish list event, Special Wants - with the help of donors and angels - have granted over 8,760+ wishes!

We became a 501c3 in 2019 and have been blessed to receive many financial donations each year. Here is a summary by year:
2019 - $12,485.00
2020 - $16,817.52
2021 - $27,810.51
2022 - $15,981.63 (ytd as of 9/14/22)

100% of donations were used to grant holiday wishes for families who are caring for loved ones with special needs.

Additionally, we have had Angels from our Special Wants community grant wishes through direct purchases for families that total over $200,000 worth of wishes! We have been blessed by so many angels within this special community! We hope you find this website easy to use, and encourage you to share the link with others who may want to consider being an angel and granting wishes this year!

Virtual Power Hour- 2021

Special Wants organized a virtual fitness fundraising event during May 8-15. We asked participants to pledge to one hour of fitness during that time frame. It was our goal to sign up at least 1 person from each of the 50 U.S. States. In the end, we had 63 participants signed up from 30 US States. We shared a music play list to enjoy during this virtual event, so we can enjoy "apart, but together." We raised a total of $2095.08!