Our community is important to us and through the years we have supported local charities and causes. In late 2009 we decided to take this even further and actively support a specific charity each month. Gilles matches your donations dollar for dollar, and 100% of the monies we collect go to the charity. Due to the generous contributions from our wonderful and caring customers and those from Gilles, this program has been a terrific success. Thank you for helping us give back to those in need in our community!
If you have a suggestion for a charity for us to highlight, please let us know by using this link. When choosing a charity we focus on those that help people directly and have administrative costs of 10% or less.
The Monthly Charity for July is Kathy's House. Find out more about their great work at https://kathys-house.org/.
Kathy’s House is a hospital guest house committed to providing affordable lodging and caring support in a “home away from home” environment for families who need to travel to Milwaukee for medical care. Our story starts with the selfless vision of a dying young woman. In 2000, Kathy Vogel Kuettner, 39, a wife with three small daughters, died of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While she was in the hospital, she worried about someone else: another young cancer patient down the hall. Unlike Kathy, he was suffering alone because his family lived out of town and couldn’t afford to stay to be with him.
Before she died, Kathy asked her parents, Dick and Judy Vogel, to create an affordable place to stay to keep families together. They rallied friends and family to make it happen. Thanks to their relentless efforts, in July 2001, Kathy’s House opened in a leased building in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, dedicated to the memory of this kind, compassionate young woman.
As demand for our services grew, our 18-room house was frequently at capacity. Too often facing the heartbreaking decision to turn away guests and facing the expiration of our lease, we began to explore options for a new, larger building. In 2019, we announced our plans to build a new Kathy’s House on a site near Froedtert Hospital, where many of our guests receive medical treatment. Donors nationwide, from past guests to big companies, generously gave to our building project. In June 2021, we opened our new, 38-room house that we believe will be a national model for hospital guest houses. At 32,000 square feet, more than twice the size of our previous building, the new Kathy’s House doubles our capacity to serve guests.
Some of our past Monthly Charities are: