Maxwells Smile

Kid Flicks
    Berni, Romi, Lexi and Marni Barta
    How the Barta sisters inspire others:
    Walk into the backyard pool house at the Bartas’ family home in Los Angeles, and there’s a good chance you’ll find more than bottles of chlorine, towels and a place to change. Instead, be prepared to step over piles of DVDs.
    That’s because sisters Berni, Romi, Lexi and Marni Barta are the force behind Kid Flicks, a not-for-profit organization that collects and donates new and gently used kids’ DVDs to children’s hospitals and pediatric departments across the U.S. They started Kid Flicks when they were just kids themselves.
    “Movies are not going to cure cancer, but Kid Flicks offers one extra step to making a child’s stay more enjoyable,” says Marni Barta, now a twenty-year-old student at Northwestern University outside Chicago. “Having a distraction can definitely help.”
    Any pediatric nurse or hospital child life specialist would agree that Kid Flicks offers more than just a way to pass the time. Movies can act as a balm to soothe scared or bored children who have undergone surgery, are fighting cancer and other diseases, or are recuperating after an injury. Children in intensive care or cancer wards for lengthy stays often feel the world is going on without them, and watching DVDs can help them feel connected to “normal life.”
    As one hospital professional from Washakie Medical Center in Wyoming wrote to Kid Flicks, “Having these movies to keep the children occupied helps in so many ways. The more children can be distracted from their illnesses, the quicker they can heal.”
    New uses for old movies
    Kid Flicks started as a simple idea that grew. In the spring of 2002, as the Bartas were doing their spring cleaning, they came across piles of childhood videos the girls, then in their teen and preteen years, no longer watched. But what should they do with all those Sesame Street shows and Disney flicks?
    Lexi, then the oldest, at sixteen, came up with a plan: they’d donate their old movies to a pediatric oncology department at a local Los Angeles hospital where their friend had once been successfully treated for leukemia.
    “We hated the idea of just throwing them away, especially because they were movies we loved so much as kids,” says Lexi, who now works for a creative agency in L.A. “We needed a way to make good use of them and share them with others.”
    The girls and their mother drove to the hospital with a box of their VHS videos, and passed them over to the child-life specialist on staff, who was more than a little surprised by the donation. She had no idea it was coming. But she was also thrilled. “Movies are the first thing kids ask for when they are in the hospital,” she told them.
    That day, the girls knew they were on to something, and decided to start collecting other children’s video castoffs to donate to more hospitals. They solicited friends, family, schools, churches, temples and other organizations. They even contacted movie studios and production companies and requested videos for the cause.
    Movie donations started pouring in. Every time they collected a hundred videos, the girls would box them up and drive to another hospital within a five-hour round-trip radius, to drop them off in person.
    Berni, the youngest sister, and today a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, says the experience of meeting children in the hospitals stays with her still.
    “A lot of times we’d get a chance to talk to the kids,” she says. “They would open the box and look through the movies and get so excited. It was so heartwarming and rewarding to see the impact we were having. It kept us going.”
    From small idea to big plans
    Once the girls had donated 1 hundred-movie collections to all the children’s departments in Southern California hospitals, they realized they had a question to address: how could they have more of an impact? The answer was clear. They needed to find ways to generate money so they could reach their new goal of providing every children’s hospital and pediatric department in the country with a Kid Flicks “movie library.”
    With the help of their father, a lawyer, they applied for not-for-profit status and were on their way. Reporters started calling, their pediatrician distributed information about Kid Flicks in her patient newsletter, and adults and kids started drives that brought in money and movies.
    By April 2011, Kid Flicks had donated 58,300