Nearly a month after the deadly Texas floods, a local non-profit is stepping up to comfort those who lost family, friends, and everything they own.
The Comfort Cub provides weighted, therapeutic teddy bears to people in crisis. Founder Marcella Johnson said these bears are more than just a toy.
“It’s that weight that when it’s put against your body, it causes deep touch pressure, and that actually allows your body to have a physiological response that calms your body,” Johnson said. “It causes your heart rate to slow. It causes your breathing to slow down, and it gives you an overall sense of calm. So, it’s very, very helpful in a traumatic or very difficult situation.”
Johnson said when she saw the devastation left behind by the floods in the Texas Hill Country over the July Fourth weekend, she knew she had to do something to help. More than 135 people were killed in the floods, many of them children.
“I think that every single American or anyone who heard this story was absolutely, deeply touched by it,” she said.
Tony Dickey
Tony Dickey
A Comfort Cub along a river that flooded over the Fourth of July weekend, killing more than 100 people.
Earlier this month, renowned disaster-relief chaplain Tony Dickey handed out 210 Comfort Cubs to flood victims, on behalf of the organization, and this week, volunteer ambassador Beverly King is delivering hundreds more.
King, a survivor of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, received her own Comfort Cub after the tragedy, and Johnson said she was “really touched by how much it helped her” and wanted to do the same for others.
“Everybody wants to do something, and there’s not, you know, a lot that we can do. But if we can send them a cub that we know will give them physiological relief and a sense of calm, that means so much to me,” Johnson said.
Johnson started The Comfort Cub 25 years ago, after the death of her infant son.
Since then, they’ve delivered thousands of bears to hospitals, crisis centers and disaster zones across the country.