LI Business Owner Conducts Hundreds Of Car Parades For Community

PATCHOGUE-MEDFORD, NY — A Long Island business owner is helping to bring some joy to the Patchogue-Medford community amid the coronavirus crisis. Medford resident Gabby Heilman is used to "bringing the party" to people through her company Fun Rentals. However once COVID-19 hit and all parties had to be put on hold, Heilman decided to find a new way to still "bring the party" to local residents.

In March, she began seeing videos on social media of people in other states doing car parades to celebrate birthdays, graduations and any other big events, and decided to bring it to her local community.

"I just figured it was something that could bring the community together,"she told Patch. "I have two kids of my own, so I feel really bad for all the children who have birthdays right now and can't celebrate the way they normally do."

Since then, Heilman has put together over 100 parades for the people in the local community. In addition to birthday parades, she helped planned a tribute parade to all the healthcare workers at the nearby Long Island Community Hospital in East Patchogue and a "welcome home" parade for a local woman who returned home from the Army after being away since November.

She started off just doing these events for her local friends and family, but after receiving calls to do them for other people in the community, she started a Facebook group Pat-Med birthday parades, which now has almost 500 members. While she never expected to receive so many requests for parades, Heilman says many members of the community love it.

"As long as we're shut down I'm going to continue to do it," she said. "I'm home, I'm not working, I have the time to do it and if I can make people feel better in my community than why not?"

While several people have offered to donate some money to Heilman, she still plans and conducts all these parades for free.

"There's a lot of families that aren't working right now so the least that I can do is do something to make their kids birthday special," she said.

One of the most memorable parades for Heilman was for the birthday of 13-year-old boy whose father, a nurse at Long Island Community Hospital, passed away just a few weeks before. She said hundreds of cars and even the fire department came out to support this family.

Heilman is not planning on stopping anytime soon and is still receiving calls everyday to schedule more parades. She said she has another 30 parades planned so far in the near future.

All photos courtesy of Gabby Heilman