Earlier this year, Spaceman donated a soft serve ice cream machine to Camp Hope, a non-profit camp that offers a traditional summer camp experience for children who have, or have had, cancer.
We got the chance to speak to Rachel Robbins, Chianna Hemken, and Kyle Morris, three current volunteers who are also former campers, to hear about how their experience with the soft serve machine went.
Camp Hope normally takes place at Camp Aldrich near Claflin, Kansas, but a tragic fire in 2018 forced Camp Hope to relocate to Barton Community College for two years. Though the fires were unfortunate, something positive came from them. While hosting camp at Barton Community College, Chianna noticed that the college had their very own soft serve machine. After seeing how awesome it was to have personal and unlimited access to an ice cream machine, Chianna reached out to the directors at Camp Hope and Camp Aldrich, hoping they would be on board with getting their own soft serve machine, but she was turned down. It wasn’t until Rachel learned of the story that she put together a fundraiser video, and reached out to Jeff Glenn, sales manager at LMS Associates in Texas who represents Spaceman equipment. Jeff Glenn then reached out to Jeff Resnick, CEO of Spaceman, who happily agreed to gift a soft serve machine to Camp Hope, free of charge.
It’s safe to say the machine was an absolute hit, and Kyle even said he believes it’s the second best addition to the camp—after air conditioning. The volunteers at Camp Hope had to put hours of operation on the machine because the campers wanted to serve themselves custard for breakfast, and were eager to eat it all day. Kyle also mentioned how the machine is going to come in handy for their high-needs campers that need to receive cancer treatments during their time at camp, who may have trouble digesting certain foods. Custard is easy to consume and gives the campers more options to eat when they cannot stomach regular foods. Rachel, Kyle, and Chianna were all in agreement that the machine worked great and were impressed with the quality.
Spaceman USA was more than happy to be a part of this experience with Camp Hope. After seeing all the smiles on the campers faces and hearing about how successful the machine was, we don’t think we could have chosen a better organization to support.