Felix Festa Middle School Hat Day For Cancer

The story behind the Heavenly Hats Foundation

In 2001 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 new hats and then deliver the hats 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 ahold 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’s were dropping off pallets of hats in Anthony’s driveway.  Anthony’s mom DeeAnn made a hard decision to leave her job and learn the non-profit sector so that Anthony could keep his Heavenly Hats Foundation and dream of providing hats to every patient who needed them alive.

It is now 22 years later and with the help of many volunteers the Heavenly Hats Foundation has donated over 4,500,000 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 head wear is donated by large hat companies who provide us with their end of season stock, some of our hats are donated by clubs, groups or individuals.  All of our fundraisers that we hold are to raise money to ship the hats to the 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 $10.00-$25.00 to ship and a large box of hats to a hospital costs us approximately $50.00 -$150.00 to ship. The cancer patients who receive our hat packages are already facing very difficult times so we want the hat packages to be completely free to these patients in need. It has been a tough couple of years with this virus, but we are still hanging in there and providing all of our hat packages free of all charges including the shipping.

I hope that this gives you a little perspective into our foundation and we greatly appreciate any support that you may be able to provide.