Icing on the Cake: Local group helps make children’s birthdays special

By Jaya Patil/For InsideNoVa

April 6, 2023

Christopher was very impressed with his birthday cake.

Many organizations deliver flowers, fruit, packages and personal messages, but one in Northern Virginia delivers love – along with cakes.

Libby Gruender founded Cake4Kids in California 13 years ago to provide homemade cakes to local children on their birthdays. Volunteers expanded the nonprofit across the state, baking and delivering cakes to children who otherwise might not have one.

Cake4Kids partners with schools, agencies and individuals to serve children who are in foster care, low-income homes or experiencing homelessness or other difficulties.

Fair Oaks resident Mary Campbell read about the organization while looking for more to do close to home. “For a lot of these children, it may be the first cake they ever received,” she said.

For Campbell’s kids, volunteering was essential when her husband was an active Navy captain and they were moving frequently. “It's a great way to help them have roots, which is hard when you're a military child.”

She asked Cake4Kids leadership if she could start a chapter in Virginia. After more than a year of logistics and paperwork, Campbell founded Cake4Kids Northern Virginia in April 2019, the first chapter outside of California.

One of the cakes made by volunteer baker Phyllis Maggio, one of the 30 Cake4Kids volunteers in Prince William County.

The chapter now has more than 600 volunteers and has partnered with over 100 local agencies. Cake4Kids Northern Virginia has baked some 3,600 cakes since 2019, with over 200 cakes in January alone. Each of those cakes has affected at least one child.

“[Families] don't have to choose between paying a bill and celebrating their child's birthday. We make that possible for them,” Campbell said.

Volunteers involve their families, too. Campbell’s husband, Bill, and their adult sons, Tyler and Nolan, complete deliveries sometimes.

Volunteer Farah Syed joined Cake4Kids at the start of 2020 after moving from New York to Ashburn. She was looking for ways to get involved in her new community when she saw Cake4Kids on Facebook.

She dove into baking when she left her teaching career. “Once I had my daughter, I had to put a lot of things aside, but baking was always there,” she said. “That helped me when I was not teaching.”

When her son was born, she was too busy to bake, but Cake4Kids brought it back to her.

For some volunteers, baking is their forte. Bristow resident Phyllis Maggio bakes for local school shows and events and crochets for charities when she’s not volunteering for Cake4Kids. For others, it’s one way to help.

But volunteers do not need to be expert bakers or commit to a certain number of hours, although Cake4Kids will reimburse bakers up to $100 a year for classes.

“We put a lot of pressure on ourselves because we want to deliver the most amazing thing … but [the kids are] happy … if their name is on it, it’s all theirs, and they picked it,” Campbell said.

“It seems like a very simple thing,” she added: a cake for a kid. But Cake4Kids’ impact extends from volunteers to their families, from kids to their case workers, and more.

“It’s not only me, it’s the whole community getting together and making this one child’s day,” Syed said.

Maggio noted that at a minimum just a box of mix and some icing will remind a child that they matter. “It costs you nothing to be kind, but it might be worth everything to the person you help.”

Syed said that by providing the cakes, the organization builds children’s self-confidence and sense of belonging in a community.

“The main goal is to make sure that all children are feeling loved and special,” she said. ““No matter what you’re going through, someone is caring about you.”