By Linda Willing
There are those calls that just stick with you.
Kurt DeGroot had recently become a full-time career firefighter south of Chicago when he had such a call. He had already spent 12 years as a paid on-call and part-time firefighter while building a career in the construction trades. In 2016, he responded as a firefighter/paramedic to transport a child who was battling cancer. It affected him deeply.
“I remember coming back and asking a lot of the senior firefighters and my officer, ‘How can we do more?’” he said.
When they told him that there wasn’t anything else they could do, DeGroot remembers, “I didn’t really like that answer.” So, he started looking for a solution.
“I went to my fire chief and said, ‘Hey, I want to do something more. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what I’m going to call it, but I just want to do something.’”
DeGroot’s chief gave him the green light to move forward with ideas on how to better serve children in need within their community.
And that was the beginning of Project Fire Buddies.
Making a difference
The first contact came from that pivotal call – a child battling leukemia. DeGroot talked to the boy’s mother and offered to have the fire crew come over to play some games with him. DeGroot remembers that the boy and his brothers “embarrassed us at air hockey and video games, but they thought it was the greatest thing.”
The boy’s mother shared the story with a local reporter, after which the word spread through social media and other families reached out.
“We started to realize that we had more kids than we thought who were battling these different critical illnesses,” DeGroot said.
Since then, Project Fire Buddies has provided support in various ways to hundreds of children. For some kids, just having the fire crew visit their home is a thrill. Others require more creative approaches. DeGroot remembered a 17-year-old aspiring soccer star who lost a leg to bone cancer: “We wanted to do something special for him, but we’re not so cool to 17-year-olds.”
DeGroot cold-called the professional soccer team in Chicago and told them the story. He ended up arranging for the young man to attend a playoff game and go out on the field with his family: “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for this young man, to give him a much-deserved better day in his life.”
DeGroot’s wife, who serves as the project’s executive administrative assistant and mission manager, shared his excitement about this event and encouraged him to expand his reach: “She told me, ‘This is awesome, but why don’t you do that for everybody?’”
This shared sense of passion and commitment has ultimately allowed Project Fire Buddies to expand to 110 chapters in 10 states.
Networking and project expansion
The organization’s support for children is far-reaching. Firefighters who act as Fire Buddies deliver personalized gifts, spend unprogrammed time with children, play games, sponsor outings, and more. Initially run as a private endeavor, Project Fire Buddies became a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization two years after it was established.
Personal networking has been at the heart of the organization’s success and expansion. One of the first contacts DeGroot made was with Kendall Schofield, a professional hockey player and Olympic gold medalist who is married to Michael Schofield, a professional football player.
“[Michael Schofield’s] dad is a fire chief in a neighboring town, so they got wind of what was going on, and they reached out to us,” DeGroot said.
Since then, the organization has developed relationships with numerous celebrities, including Dwayne Johnson (aka “The Rock”), Luke Bryan, Brent Sopel and others. A big supporter of the project is David Eigenberg, who plays Lt. Christopher Herrmann on the TV show “Chicago Fire.”
“That guy is salt of the earth,” said DeGroot. “He comes on kids’ visits and attends the gala every year. He’s one of my closest friends because of the organization.”
Relationships are at the core of Project Fire Buddies’ mission. Contact with children who are part of the program is not treated as a single event. The basic assumption within the organization is that fire crews will have a minimum of four contacts per year with each child, and even if a child “rings the bell” as a symbol of being cured of their critical illness, Fire Buddies continue to interact with that child for at least a year more.
What started as a passion project around DeGroot’s kitchen table has grown exponentially over the years. Now there are paid staff and hundreds of volunteers, legal counsel and a medical team to review applications. DeGroot has been interviewed on national television programs, and the organization’s social media sites get approximately 380,000 views per month. The last annual gala sold out more than 1,200 seats in less than an hour. Fundraising raffles offer vehicles as prizes and, of course, there is also swag – over 60,000 T-shirts purchased so far, which DeGroot insists is “the most comfortable shirt out there.”
Honoring ‘the true warriors’
One thing that DeGroot has seen firsthand is that generosity begets generosity. The 17-year-old soccer player is now a high school coach who holds fundraisers with his team for pediatric cancer. A child they contacted who had a colostomy bag as a result of cancer surgery donated his Make a Wish to another child from the cancer floor.
DeGroot’s three children have also been involved since the beginning, limiting their Christmas gifts to just one each, so they could donate money for additional gifts to the children in need. “They loved every part of it,” he said.
When asked about the future, DeGroot shared his dream outcome: “Go big or go home. Things happen naturally and it’s a beautiful thing to watch. I would love for us to be in all 50 states and to be in every firehouse.”
In his mind, the project is the natural outgrowth of the role of first responders.
“The thing is, we’re firefighters and paramedics. We get out there to help people in their time of need,” DeGroot said. “But in our down time, we can honor the most vulnerable in our community, which are these kids. They are the true warriors.”
