Current Campaign

The first campaign

The first time I walked into the NAPA Center, as the parent of a newly diagnosed baby boy, I didn't know what to expect.

All around us were children with some of the most severe and rare neurological disabilities in existence, and therapists working with them with calm, focus, and complete devotion. One child there carried a diagnosis shared by only eight people in the entire world, all of them children.

My son Brody was born with cerebral palsy. He reached many of his milestones later than what is typical. Most parents remember their children's first steps. I remember Brody's. It happened at the NAPA Center, with his physical therapist Rebecca. I have it on video. He was so proud of himself. Most people take that kind of moment for granted. For these kids, they are miraculous accomplishments, and the therapy behind them is what makes that possible. 

I helped start the NAPA Center Kids Foundation in 2014 and served as its director of fundraising through 2015, because of what I saw in those rooms.

Here is the quiet problem. Many of the therapies that help these children have never been studied enough to convince an insurer to cover them. Not because they do not work, but because nobody has built the evidence yet. So the answer families hear is no, and whether a child gets that therapy comes down to what their parents can afford.

The NAPA Center Kids Foundation is working to change that answer. It is building the research that turns what therapists already see every day into evidence strong enough to move insurers, health systems, and the people who decide what care children can get.

Evidence does not help one child at a time. It changes what every child is offered.

That is what this book is for. It is not only for the children at the NAPA Center.  It is also for the ones whose parents have not gotten the diagnosis yet, in cities where there is no NAPA Center, who will one day be told yes for a reason nobody had to fight for alone.

 

The book

My sister Karen spent 30 years teaching kindergarten and first grade. Together we wrote a children's book, Brody the Coyote: Chocolate Milk Lake, about a coyote named Brody who lives in the Marshmallow Mountains. We've been partners on many things for a long time and I am so happy that she is part of this campaign and this book.

Brody wears a brace on his front left leg and cannot see well in the distance. He is slower than the rest of his pack. When a group of coyote kids gets lost coming back from the lake after dark, he is the one who gets them home safely.

He reminds every child who reads his story, and every adult who reads it to them, that the things that set you apart don't define your limits. They define your gifts.

This holiday season

We ask one simple favor. Buy a book. Give it to a child you love. 

Know that somewhere on the other end of that transaction, a question that matters to families raising children with disabilities gets closer to an answer, and a little closer to becoming care a child can actually get.

We shine the light. You help it grow.

$6.00 per book sold goes directly to the NAPA Center Kids Foundation. November 1 through December 31, 2026. No cap on the total.

— Michael Volk, Founder