Every year on the Saturday before Easter, the annual Breakfast with the Bunny, organized by Help to Others (H2O), is held at the Cove Community Center. This year, the event was on March 28th from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
It is held for parents and their kids to sign up to go eat breakfast, take pictures with the Easter bunny, and enter a raffle basket giveaway. H2O administrators Amy Chodzin and Emmie Hutchinson ran the event, and high school and middle school students volunteered to help.
Breakfast with the Bunny has been a tradition for over 20 years. It was originally run by the Lakewood Junior Women’s Club, and all the money they raised was donated to H2O, eventually turning the fundraiser into an official H2O tradition. The students volunteering through H2O make the event all the more special.
“The goal of Breakfast with the Bunny is to provide a low-cost, fun event for young families in our community, and it is a fundraiser for H2O”, said Chodzin.
Before Breakfast with the Bunny, H2O works to get the word out by contacting the same families from previous years, advertising the breakfast at as many locations as possible and recruiting enough student volunteers to run the event. The families who keep coming back every year for the breakfast and donate to H2O allow the tradition to continue and create Easter memories for their kids.
Inside the Cove Community Center, the space was transformed with spring and Easter decorations, including a festive backdrop for family pictures with the bunny. Tables were decorated with stuffed bunnies to mark the table numbers, and utensils were wrapped to look like carrots. This year, each kid who took a picture with the bunny was given candy, a fun way to get kids more excited about posing for a picture.
Breakfast with the Bunny was split into two shifts, morning and afternoon. Student volunteers picked a shift they wanted to volunteer for and helped serve tables, pass out raffle tickets, bus tables, dress in the bunny suit and take pictures.
The bunny volunteers had 35-minute shifts to take pictures with families, with breaks in between, allowing the bunny volunteers and attendees to sit and enjoy their breakfast and enter the raffle before taking pictures. Volunteering for this event allows students to gain job experience and volunteer hours that count toward graduation.
“It was very enjoyable, I had some really great food and the service was super quick,” said Grace Lowmiller, a Lakewood High School student attending Breakfast with the Bunny.
This year’s breakfast was sponsored by First Federal Lakewood and received donations from 11 generous local businesses in Lakewood. These donations allowed H2O to give away raffle baskets filled with personal care products, toys, gift cards and more. People attending the breakfast were encouraged to buy raffle tickets to win a basket. If they won a basket, they would receive a phone call with instructions on how to claim their prize.
Breakfast with the Bunny this year included a student from Lakewood High School’s Business class, Erin Boyer. Through her business class, she interns for the H2O program to gain more business and volunteer experience before college. For this event, she was asked to volunteer to take the family pictures with the bunny. Boyer did a wonderful job operating the camera and getting kids to pose and smile.
“I really like seeing the community come together for a good fundraiser for H2O,” said Boyer.
Lakewood is such a tight-knit community because it has many traditions, like this breakfast, that are interactive and involve residents of all ages. The Lakewood community is made up of very generous businesses and people who donate and volunteer to make the city such a special place. Breakfast with the Bunny is a special, festive tradition that will hopefully continue each year, allowing families to create Easter memories.
