Happy holidays, cuties! ‘Tis the season to give back, and it’s with that spirit that I am excited to announce an upcoming shop-for-a-cause event with New Beginnings Community Center that we have planned at our Kathy Kuo Home Southampton flagship store!
On Saturday, December 11, 2021, from 11am to 6pm, we’ll be donating 10 percent of KKH Southampton sales to New Beginnings—a local outpatient facility on Long Island designed to provide rehabilitation, management, and recovery for community members with traumatic brain injury, physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities or dementia—all in an exceptional, stimulating and safe environment.
Read on to learn more about the important work New Beginnings is doing for our local Hamptons community, and also to get all the details about special in-store activations we have planned for the rest of the holiday season at KKH Southampton!
Shop for a Cause: New Beginnings Community Center
Supporting worthy causes in our area is at the heart of our business at KKH Southampton–so I couldn’t be more honored to be partnering with New Beginnings to support the work they do to support people affected by traumatic brain injuries (TBI) throughout Long Island. To shine the brightest light on this amazing organization, we caught up with founder Allyson Scerri–Allyson is a Long Island native, whose whose experience caring for her father after he suffered a TBI in 2007 inspired the work she does today:
You founded New Beginnings after your own experience supporting a loved one with a TBI–that’s so powerful and meaningful!
Allyson: Thirty years ago, my mother was killed tragically in a car accident and she died of a traumatic brain injury, and then fast-forward to 2007 and my father was in a motorcycle accident. He lived but he had to have brain surgery and he was never the same after that and he was in a wheelchair.
Through him living with me and finding ways to rehabilitate him and give him the best quality of life is when I realized that I wanted my tragedies to turn into something more like a triumph that could help other people and learn from my hardships.
“I hope in giving back it makes it easier for the next person–I can take them step by step and I can make this a lot easier than how it was when I went through it.”
Tell us about New Beginnings and its services and mission.
Allyson: New Beginnings is a rehabilitation center that helps people with all physical and cognitive injuries, such as strokes, traumatic brain injuries, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. We treat patients from the age of 2 all the way up. We offer speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, a structured day program, psychological therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
One service that we offer is called the Brendan House. The Brendan House is a place where people live–our newest resident is named Dana and she’s 30 years old and she dove into a pool and became paralyzed from the neck down. She has a special apartment where everything is voice-activated–the lights, the TV, the heat. She has 24-hour care. She goes out to dinner and has friends over and all that.
“We believe in life after injury. We do a lot of fun things and we believe in a lot of socialization. After a major injury, friends often stop coming around and people get depressed–so we like to have a lot of different parties and events to keep spirits up.”
We’re so happy to be able to give back to New Beginnings–what should people know about the initiatives that the donations will support?
Allyson: A lot of times donations go to hardship funds for people in need who don’t have insurance. Also, right now we’re raising money to put a pool in so that we can have aqua therapy. That’s our next big goal.
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Embrace the Holiday Season at KKH Southampton
In addition to inviting you to stop by to shop for an amazing local cause, we are also oh-so-excited to have some special seasonal activations happening at Kathy Kuo Home Southampton this holiday season! We’ll be serving Hot Apple Cider and Hot Chocolate on the weekends (from now through Christmas) to help our shoppers stay warm and cozy.
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