Easter Seals has been helping children and adults with disabilities, and their families, live better lives for almost 100 years. Easter Seals provides a lot of services to help people with disabilities deal with challenges and reach personal goals. These services range from child development centers to physical rehabilitation and job training for people with disabilities. It all started in 1907 when Edgar Allen, a businessman in Ohio, lost his son in a streetcar accident. Proper medical services were not available to save his son, so Allen sold his business and started a fund-raising campaign to build a hospital where he lived in Elyria, Ohio. In building this new hospital, Allen found out how much children with disabilities were often hidden from public view. This discovery moved Allen in 1919 to begin the first organization to help children with disabilities, and it became known as the National Society for Crippled Children.
In the spring of 1934, the organization started its first Easter “seals” campaign to raise money for its services by having donors put these seals on envelopes and letters. Cleveland Plain Dealer cartoonist J.H. Donahey created the first seal design on the idea of simplicity because those who were being helped asked “simply for the right to live a normal life.” Then in 1952, the lily was adopted as Easter Seals’ logo because it is connected with spring, resurrections and new life. By 1967, the Easter “seal” was understood so well by people that the organization officially changed its name to “Easter Seals.”
