This is a brief note to confirm receipt of the teddy bears donated to the New York Downtown Hospital.  We at Downtown Hospital extend our gratitude for your continuous support in making the children feel the warmth of accepting and hugging the bears.  We will incorporate the gift giving activities of the bears into our daily routine.

The recent delivery of 36 Teddy bears to our Chief of Police became a TRA Teddy Bears for Kids first. In accepting the Teddy bears, Chief Thomas J. Ford, III, noted his department’s pride in having been selected for the debut of the expanded program. He explained that the “Theodore Roosevelt Association Teddy bears, which we’ve placed in each cruiser and at the town’s Public Safety Complex, will ease difficult moments for frightened children and, further, comfort confused elders. We welcome the Teddy bears as a warm way to deliver sensitive community policing, and we’re pleased to participate in this first-ever step by the TRA.”

The decision to expand the Teddy bear program to police agencies, from the long-standing hospital focus, resulted from a conversation, at last December’s Teddy Bear benefit event, between Mr. Pehta, who heads Teddy Bears for Kids, and TRA President James Bruns. They saw the contemporary relationship of policing and the Teddy bear tradition that arises from President Roosevelt’s leadership, as New York City’s Police Commissioner, in professionalizing law enforcement, and making the officers, as he did, responsible to the citizenry.

As it happened, in arranging my own sponsorship of Teddy bears to this locale’s community hospital, I suggested to Mr. Pehta the idea of a shipment of the stuffed animals to the Sturbridge Police Department. It was his interest and energy, with Mr. Bruns, that made the program expansion possible. I’m proud, as a TRA member, to have helped and to have witnessed TRA’s responsiveness to actionable ideas with a historical anchor.

While Teddy Bears for Kids reaches beyond TRA’s hometown of New York City to include hospitals across the country, during the year-end holidays, it concentrates year-round on distribution to City hospitals.

I was much impressed by the TRA staff’s prompt delivery, in time for Christmas, of 36 Teddy bears to the pediatric unit of the 113-bed Harrington Memorial Hospital, in neighboring Southbridge, Massachusetts.

The Teddy bears, according to Ann Beaudry, BSN, RN, the Nurse Manager of Maternal and Children’s Services, were immediately put in the outstretched arms of little patients. “Oh, the cuddling and laughter and smiles,” she observed, adding that “we’re so grateful to the Theodore Roosevelt Association.”