Kiwanis Dolls
In 1915 an organisation formed in Detroit, USA, with the name “Supreme Lodge Benevolent Order of Brothers”. A year later they changed it to “Kiwanis International”. The Native American Indian Algonquian language translates Kiwanis as “we build”.
It is a benevolent organisation focused on serving children. I’m not going to go into all the things that they do but in 1993 one of their clubs in Southern Australia started making Kiwanis dolls and you’ll now find these all over the world in a hospital near you.
Kiwanis Dolls?
In the summer of 2023 I was strolling through a passageway in Prague known for it’s efforts to help local artists. I happened to stop at a window containing 30 or so cloth dolls decorated in various ways. It reminded me of the “Cow Parade” years earlier where celebrities sponsored the decoration of plastic cows for charity. I wasn’t far off as these dolls had also been decorated by celebrities and were to be auctioned off to raise money.
What caught my eye though was a picture of a plain white doll being held by a kid in a hospital and so I began learning about the Kiwanis network and their dolls.
The Purpose of Kiwanis Dolls
In short, a Kiwanis Doll helps a child in hospital who will be away from their normal environment i.e. no parents, no friends and no toys. Psychologists have known for years that displacing emotion onto objects helps people deal with trauma, helps people communicate problems, helps people understand better. In 1993 somebody in Southern Australia came up with the idea that any child in hospital might benefit from having a doll which could help in some way. Possibly just as company for the child or as a distraction from the surroundings but it had a serious side as well. Medical professionals could use the doll to explain what was wrong or what needed to be done. The doll would be with the child for the whole process i.e. pre-operation, procedure, rehabilitation and finally would go home with them. Volunteers bought material and cotton stuffing and got to work on the very first dolls.
A lot of thought went into what looks like a very simple cloth toy. It had to be huggable for a child so that determined the size. It had to work for anybody so no sexual orientation. It had to become what the child wanted it to be so it had to be a blank design onto which the child could apply their own decoration. This simple idea has become a worldwide phenomenon with Kiwanis clubs making these dolls in more than 80 different countries.
In Czechia there are currently 5 towns and cities with Kiwanis clubs. The Světlá nad Sázavou Prison gives women inmates the opportunity to sew these dolls for rehabilitation as part of their sentence.
At the time of writing there are nearly half a million “Kiwanians” in the world who average more than 7 million hours of work per year just helping kids. The dolls are just a small part of that work.