A masquerade 20 years in the making awaits guests this December at Miracle Ball, Arkansas Children’s signature fundraising event. Filled with intentional and meaningful details alongside its glittering finery, the hospital’s momentous milestone will see Mary and Fred Scarborough take the helm as co-chairs in a poignant callback to their involvement with the event from the very beginning.
Fred, executive vice president and chief development officer for Arkansas Children’s, was instrumental in establishing Miracle Ball as the organization’s first black-tie fundraiser in 2006. Before lending his fundraising expertise to Arkansas Children’s, Fred was the director of development for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, where he and Mary worked on the organization’s Opus Ball.
“It felt like [Arkansas Children’s] needed a moment to celebrate the miraculous nature of care, and that needed to be a full stop,” Fred says. “[Miracle Ball] has become that. It’s 550 of our closest friends, people who live this mission every single day.”
Yet the experience that shaped Fred’s career and Mary’s continued involvement with Arkansas Children’s was not his professional background or their work with Opus, but their role as parents. Nearly 25 years ago, the Scarboroughs’ 10-month-old son, Elijah, was hospitalized at Arkansas Children’s for meningitis.
“He ended up staying in the PICU for about two and a half months,” Mary says. “I basically lived at the hospital.”
Tragically, Elijah passed away at the end of his illness.
“We brought him home with hospice at the very end of his life, which Children’s had never done with anyone before,” she says. “They were very supportive the whole time with anything that we needed, just like they are with every patient and every family.”
From then on, Elijah’s parents were committed to the hospital’s mission.
“The results we had with losing our son are not the results that we really talk about a whole lot. We usually tell the stories that have a little bit happier endings or at least are in the middle of their story,” Mary says. “But it does happen for people, and it’s an important part of how Children’s helps people. They help shepherd people through that process with their children much more than we ever hear about. It’s a really important piece.”
About a year and a half after Elijah’s death, Fred was offered a position at Arkansas Children’s.
“Everything we’ve done that’s been mission-driven has been something that was meaningful to our family,” Fred says. “So we spent a long time in the arts and had incredible experiences, really working with people who wanted to enliven our community through the arts.”
Yet the Scorbourghs’ experience with Elijah brought another meaningful opportunity to the forefront.
“I knew I could talk to anyone about this mission,” Fred says. “We could not have gone anywhere else in the world and had a better outcome or a different outcome. And as a parent who replays every moment, the ‘what should have, what could have been different,’ having that stalwart assurance, that everybody did their best, everybody was at the top of their game and the very best service was provided, has fueled us for 21 years.”
Credit: Jason Masters
Upon joining the Arkansas Children’s team, Fred approached the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Auxiliary to help him transform the Miracle Ball from idea to reality.
“They were a big yes,” Mary remembers. “None of us knew what it was going to look like, none of us knew how it was going to be. A lot of people had been to Opus or some of the other events, but you never know what your event’s going to be like until you start planning it. And this group of women was just incredible.”
The first Miracle Ball was an all-hands-on-deck learning experience.
“We literally arranged flowers in the hall and kept the temperature in the low 40s so the flowers would survive four or five days. We’re lucky we didn’t have pneumonia,” Fred says.
Mary stayed involved for the next six or seven galas, helping with everything from the silent auction to setting up, sometimes with the Scarboroughs’ second-born son Isaac strapped to her back. Eventually, she stepped away as the event and the planners came into their own.
“It was really necessary for the auxiliary. We knew what it was, it was growing and it needed to be fully theirs and not just a small group of people working on it,” Mary says. “They really took off with it. With Fred at the helm, some incredible presidents of the auxiliary and committees, they really have brought it to where we are this year.”
Fred recalls highlights during Miracle Ball’s two decade history — starting with Cindy and Chip Murphy chairing both the second and third balls to give the event consistency in the beginning. Sharon and Johnny Bale brought a sense of cohesion to the event by turning the focus on children with a theme surrounding the picture book “On the Night You Were Born” by Nancy Tillman. Committees also made sure to underscore important moments in Arkansas Children’s history with an event to match, like a Chinese New Year-themed bash to welcome incoming Arkansas Children’s CEO Marcy Doderer. And to honor its centennial in 2012, Arkansas Children’s hosted an ode to Scheherazade and her many stories, a character that was widely popular in 1912, the year of the hospital’s founding.
The 2025 theme is another tribute to the event’s roots, Arkansas Children’s legacy and the many who have helped establish it as the nationally-recognized pediatric health care system it is today. Taking cues from Truman Capote’s iconic 1966 Black and White Ball, this year’s event pays homage to that storied “party of the century.” It’s also a direct nod to the auxiliary, founded in 1967, and how pervasive and transformative this dedicated group of volunteers was and continues to be, with the ball alone raising more than 12.5 million dollars in its history.
“We turn the attention on every single chair, every single president, every single volunteer who contributed to this moment,” Fred says. “We feel privileged just to be able to say thank you to all of those people.
“We’re standing on the shoulders of hundreds, if not thousands of people, because there’s no way to do something like this for 20 years without so many people involved, and we’re pleased to be able to shine the spotlight, to look back and say thank you to some of those folks who have given such a huge gift to the children of Arkansas, which is what all this is about.”
Funds raised by Miracle Ball and the auxiliary’s year-round work have an immense impact on Arkansas Children’s, including the incremental contribution of consistent donations toward unencumbered research funding.
“A lot of research funding comes with a grant that you have to do a specific thing with, but the research institute has bills to pay that may not be covered by that grant,” Fred explains. “The auxiliary has always given an unrestricted gift to the institute to pay bills that maybe a grant won’t cover.”
Another less talked about aspect that has been transformed by the auxiliary’s support is Arkansas Children’s initiative for abused and neglected children.
“I took the idea to the auxiliary to say, ‘You could lend your social clout, your ears and your work in the community to this very dark subject, and we can turn a light on it,’” Fred says. “I no more than got those words out than the auxiliary was championing this idea.”
They were a lead donor in establishing the David M. Clark Center for Safe and Healthy Children, a $12 million dollar building completely supported by philanthropic efforts.
Other auxiliary projects touch Arkansas Children’s patients every day including one of their first fundraising efforts, The Playaway Gift Shop. This project started as a book cart and has grown to a 3,000-square-foot enterprise where every dollar of profit goes to the hospital. The auxiliary has also championed the addition of Giraffe OmniBed Carestations for the hospital’s smallest patients and the Angel Eye Project for long-distance caregivers to feel connected to their Arkansas Children’s patient.
Credit: Jason Masters
The auxiliary’s latest fundraising pledge is monumental: $8 million dollars toward Arkansas Children’s current $318 million dollar expansion project.
“When we talk to hospitals around the country, we don’t hear about auxiliaries who are that capable,” says Fred, noting the expansion will continue to grow what Arkansas Children’s can do for Arkansas families and beyond. “It’s a new front door. It’s a beautiful new building. It is going to be gorgeous. But the real impact is in welcoming every single patient and family and having people be able to relax at that front door and say, ‘Okay, they were expecting me.’”
The refreshed Arkansas Children’s entrance will include easy access to essential services including a cafe, gift shop and streamlined signage to help families effortlessly find their way through the hospital.
Mary points to a key addition that will improve the patient experience for families across the state: an ambulatory surgery unit set to open in 2026.
“That is going to take kids that are getting ear tubes, tonsillectomies and GI process procedures … and it’s going to take them out of the regular surgery area of the hospital. So instead of having to merge in with all of the big, more complex surgeries, they can come over to the ambulatory surgery unit and they can be in and out in an hour or two,” Mary says.
With patients who live hours away from the Little Rock campus, this is a game-changing addition.
“We have lots of kids that come in who have to get in a car after this long day of waiting. These are the kinds of things that are going to be improved. They are going to have a huge impact on children and families,” Mary says. “The more refined the hospital gets and the more services with each expansion, reaching kids and reaching families becomes easier and it becomes more complete.”
Other elements of the expansion include more bed capacity, redesigned clinical spaces and growth for the Arkansas Children’s team with the addition of 100 new providers.
As Arkansas Children’s looks forward to this next chapter, Mary takes a moment to recognize how far the organization has come.
“Arkansas Children’s started as an orphanage, but it was also a vision of a group of women in Little Rock that it could be more than that,” she says. “For a long time, it was not the place where people of means took their children. Now it’s shifted and people are [thrilled to have the option to] bring their children here.
“Those ladies are not around anymore, but it’s really astounding to me to think about this group. I know they would be astounded by the level of care that the children of Arkansas are getting now. That is why we do it.”
Fred is also inspired by how far Arkansas Children’s has come, and how much farther it could go.
“And now to look at the five year plans and say, what if the nine million children in the extended region needed us? And what if we could serve those children?” Fred says. “There is no top end to this mission. We could never be done.
“It’s exciting to think every bit of effort we want to put into this will be so well received, and children we will never meet will be served by this. There’s just no better mission.”
Miracle Ball Benefitting arkansas children’s
Dec. 13, 5:30 p.m.
Arkansas Children’s Hospital
PHOTOGRAPHY
JASON MASTERS
HAIR & MAKEUP
LORI WENGER
JEWELRY
JONES & SON FINE JEWELRY