Lights of Life to look different this year

With this year’s Lights of Life event approaching, Hopkins County Health Care Foundation’s Shannon Barker is taking stock and adapting the Lights of Life to shifting circumstances.

“There are still lots of great volunteers, and people want to help and want to make sure it’s successful,” Barker said. “I feel like I have a small army who’s ready to help.”

The Lights of Life event is usually a formal gala in January at the Civic Center, but the environment is a little different this year due to COVID-19. However, Barker said the foundation didn’t want to skip a year.

“We’re going to do a virtual event on Feb. 20,” Barker said. “It’s going to be an old-school telethon. We’re going to have a phone bank with volunteers answering the phones.”

Specific details have not been released yet by the foundation and will be reported when the event draws closer.

Barker compared the change to “recreating the wheel” and credited the team of volunteers “willing to give their time and energy” to the foundation.

“One of the first things I said to the gala committee meeting is that the gala is beloved and I don’t want people showing up at my house,” Barker said with a laugh. “I hate to be the first person in 20 years not hosting the gala at the Civic Center, but we’ll be able to make it fun.”

Barker said the gala would “come back with a vengeance in 2022.”

The telethon will fundraise for two hospital projects: a new CT scanner and labor and delivery equipment. According to the foundation’s Facebook page, the current CT scanner is 12 years old and is constantly used, having done 4,150 scans June through September of last year.

“Sometimes it goes down,” Barker said. “We’re going to buy the second CT scanner so that they can both be running, so when one goes down, they [staff] won’t have to totally stop business.”

The labor and delivery project aims to purchase five Stryker birthing beds and five Panda iRes Warmers for infants. According to Barker, the panda warmers can convert into incubators for babies in newborn ICU.

“Those will really help our nursery come up to a higher caliber of care,” Barker said.