We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Steve Barr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Steve thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?

As the founder of Drawn To Help, an organization that takes cartoonists and children’s book illustrators to visit young patients in hospitals, I’ve had an incredible amount of heartwarming and heart touching experiences.

I’ve watched children who were in deep depressions suddenly be lifted out of them when they got to draw funny pictures. Studies have shown that creative activities can reduce stress and pain in patients, but when you get to see it in person it’s an absolutely amazing thing to see.

I’ve witnessed kids who have lost their appetites due to their treatments suddenly begin nibbling on food while they’re drawing, because they got so lost in what they were doing that they forget they weren’t hungry.

One time, when I was visiting a camp for children who were battling cancer, I noticed that one young girl was moving much slower than the rest of the group. She seemed to be struggling with the lessons a bit, so I slowed down and began chatting a bit more in-between each step so she could keep up.
Her drawings were really turning out beautifully, and I kept glancing down at the sheet of paper in front of her. I loved everything she drew.

After the class ended, she waited for me in the back of the room. She thanked me profusely, and then told me that she had lost the use of her right arm to cancer. She had been struggling to learn how to write with her left hand, but it just seemed like an insurmountable challenge to her and she was giving up.
But then she found herself sitting in my class. I’m left-handed. And as she began mimicking the shapes I was using to create funny pictures, she realized that if she could do the drawings, she could use those same lines and shapes to create letters and learn to write again!

She thanked me profusely. I had a huge smile on my face, and I asked her if she could possibly sign one of the drawings she had done and give it to me to have framed.

She clutched those cartoons to her chest, shook her head back and forth and said, “No. These are for my mother. She’s going to laugh and cry at the same time when she sees that I did them.”

I left the camp shortly after that encounter. And I smiled the whole way home.

Steve, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I became a professional cartoonist at a very young age. In fourth grade, I copied a drawing of Mickey Mouse onto my desk. (And I highly recommend that any young student who might read this never, ever does the same thing!)

Desks were wooden back in those days. So my sketch was kind of engraved into the top when I was done. While my fellow students loved my little creation, my teacher was not pleased at all. She made me stay after school and scrub that desk until it was as clean as I could possibly get it.
But she was a wonderful woman, and when I finished she handed me some pencils and a stack of paper and said, “Steven, take these home and draw on them instead of on furniture from now on!”

In fifth and sixth grades, I created my own comic books and sold them to the other kids for their lunch money. I was highly successful at that, and I’m still chubby to this day. They’re all skinny, so I’m guessing I ended up getting more of their lunch money than I knew I had.

In seventh grade, I sold my first cartoons to magazines and newspapers. I loved seeing my work in print and getting checks in the mail, so I decided that I would just draw cartoons for the rest of my life.

I ended up going on to create a syndicated newspaper comic strip, illustrating books and doing all sorts of fun cartoon projects in my life. I never ended up getting rich, but I loved what I did and it was a big part of who I was as a person.

I created a series of books that taught young people how to draw their own cartoons using basic lines and shapes. And those sold pretty well for the first few years after they were published. The books led to library appearances and school visits.

And then, a dear, dear friend’s teenage son was diagnosed with Leukemia. She told me that she was amazed at how uplifting and inspiring the art programs in her son’s hospital were for the young patients, and she suggested that I might want to do a visit to a children’s hospital every now and then.

When I did my first hospital visit, I had no idea what it was going to lead to. At first, it was just me drawing silly pictures with the kids. But after the staff at the first hospital saw the impact those visits had, they began telling other people in the medical field about it. In no time at all, the hospital visits took over my entire life. I began getting requests to visit patients in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

And when other cartoonists saw what I was doing, they asked if I could help them do the same thing in their areas. And that’s how Drawn To Help was formed. We’re a small (but growing!) nonprofit organization that takes cartoonists and artists to visit children in hospitals.

We give the kids free packets of art supplies, so they can continue experiencing the healing power of art long after our volunteers have gone home. We also give them autographed books from some of their favorite authors and illustrators.

We’re a really unique little organization. In response to Covid, we’ve begun doing digital programs and that has expanded our outreach as well. We’ve now served hospitals and camps for pediatric patients in eleven states, and we want to continue expanding across the country.

I’m proud and honored that we are able to inspire children who are battling for their lives and help lift their spirits. We bring them laughter and smiles, and I think that’s one of the best things anyone could possibly do.

Our volunteers include popular children’s book illustrators, former Disney animators, comic strip artists and DC and Marvel comic book creators. And I think every one of them would agree that visiting children in hospitals is one of the best things they’ve ever done.

At this point in time, we operate on a shoe-string budget. I make less money than I ever have before. And I’m richer in life experience and happiness than I could have possibly imagined. I think the kids give more back to us than we could ever possibly give to them.

And when I look back at the time when I began drawing cartoons as a child and dreamed of being a rich and famous cartoonist one day, I never could have foreseen that it would one day lead to this. I’m pretty sure my ten year-old self would be quite happy to know that one day I’d be the founder of an organization like Drawn To Help, and that my silly little sketches would touch other children battling difficult medical challenges so deeply.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Drawn To Help began as an individual effort, but grew so rapidly that we became a fiscally sponsored program rather quickly. A fiscal sponsorship allows an organization or person to seek grants and funding under the umbrella of an existing nonprofit organization. Eventually, that led to us becoming a full nonprofit standing on our own.

Our expansion to hospitals in multiple states was almost unbelievable. And then Covid hit. Our volunteers couldn’t go into the hospitals in person. It was just too risky for the children we serve to have visitors other than family. Their immune systems can be really weakened by their illness or their treatment. But we couldn’t just give up. We believed that what we were doing was too important for us to stop. So we turned to digital services. Some of our volunteers did remote broadcasts from home, utilizing the closed-circuit TV systems in some children’s hospitals to bring our programs right to the children in their rooms.

We shipped art supplies and autographed books to the hospitals to give to the kids. And then we created a wonderful digital art activity library. Cartoonists and artists from around the world contributed their work. The library contains over 400 pages of activities for children of all ages and skill levels. There are coloring pages, mazes, hidden pictures and lots of other fun stuff. And we were able to get a grant from an organization known as The Pollination Project. They provided the seed money for us to create the art libraries and put them on flash drives. The flash drives are housed in a cartoony little container shaped like a pencil, and attached to a fun, colorful lanyard.

Child Life Specialists, art therapists and nurses can print out any page a child chooses, and they can color the page by hand. And, the images can also be uploaded into art apps, so the kids can color them digitally as well. Those flash drives allowed us to continue reaching our young patients, and even led to an expansion of our services to new locations. Since the pandemic kind of came out of the clear blue, it caused us to make a fast pivot and come up with ways we could continue lifting the spirits of pediatric patients. But it ended up giving us new, unexpected opportunities.

We’re now working on creating flash drives with “how to draw” videos on them, and those can go to hospitals in locations we might never have been able to reach otherwise. And we’re helping hospitals who have closed-circuit TV systems create fresh new content for the children they serve.

To use a sports analogy, sometimes when life throws you a curveball, you just have to bunt. And every now and then, that can end up leading to a home run.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

When I look back at my life and my career as a cartoonist, I absolutely would choose the same profession. It’s been a wonderful part of my time here on earth.

But if there was one thing I would change, it would be that I would have started Drawn To Help sooner. I wish I had begun doing the hospital visits decades ago.

It’s absolutely the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. And when I see the incredible impact our work has on children who are suffering, my only regret is that I didn’t begin doing this earlier in my career.

We’ve reached thousands of young patients at this point, but I wish we could have reached thousands more.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://drawntohelp.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrawnToHelp
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-barr-55779322/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveBarr7