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Berni, Romi, Lexi and Marni Barta

How the Barta sisters inspire others:

Walk into the backyard pool house at the Bartas’ family home in Los Angeles, and there’s a good chance you’ll find more than bottles of chlorine, towels and a place to change. Instead, be prepared to step over piles of DVDs.

That’s because sisters Berni, Romi, Lexi and Marni Barta are the force behind Kid Flicks, a not-for-profit organization that collects and donates new and gently used kids’ DVDs to children’s hospitals and pediatric departments across the U.S. They started Kid Flicks when they were just kids themselves.

“Movies are not going to cure cancer, but Kid Flicks offers one extra step to making a child’s stay more enjoyable,” says Marni Barta, now a twenty-year-old student at Northwestern University outside Chicago. “Having a distraction can definitely help.”

Any pediatric nurse or hospital child life specialist would agree that Kid Flicks offers more than just a way to pass the time. Movies can act as a balm to soothe scared or bored children who have undergone surgery, are fighting cancer and other diseases, or are recuperating after an injury. Children in intensive care or cancer wards for lengthy stays often feel the world is going on without them, and watching DVDs can help them feel connected to “normal life.”

As one hospital professional from Washakie Medical Center in Wyoming wrote to Kid Flicks, “Having these movies to keep the children occupied helps in so many ways. The more children can be distracted from their illnesses, the quicker they can heal.”

New uses for old movies

Kid Flicks started as a simple idea that grew. In the spring of 2002, as the Bartas were doing their spring cleaning, they came across piles of childhood videos the girls, then in their teen and preteen years, no longer watched. But what should they do with all those Sesame Street shows and Disney flicks?

Lexi, then the oldest, at sixteen, came up with a plan: they’d donate their old movies to a pediatric oncology department at a local Los Angeles hospital where their friend had once been successfully treated for leukemia.

“We hated the idea of just throwing them away, especially because they were movies we loved so much as kids,” says Lexi, who now works for a creative agency in L.A. “We needed a way to make good use of them and share them with others.”

The girls and their mother drove to the hospital with a box of their VHS videos, and passed them over to the child-life specialist on staff, who was more than a little surprised by the donation. She had no idea it was coming. But she was also thrilled. “Movies are the first thing kids ask for when they are in the hospital,” she told them.

That day, the girls knew they were on to something, and decided to start collecting other children’s video castoffs to donate to more hospitals. They solicited friends, family, schools, churches, temples and other organizations. They even contacted movie studios and production companies and requested videos for the cause.

Movie donations started pouring in. Every time they collected a hundred videos, the girls would box them up and drive to another hospital within a five-hour round-trip radius, to drop them off in person.

Berni, the youngest sister, and today a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, says the experience of meeting children in the hospitals stays with her still.

“A lot of times we’d get a chance to talk to the kids,” she says. “They would open the box and look through the movies and get so excited. It was so heartwarming and rewarding to see the impact we were having. It kept us going.”

From small idea to big plans

Once the girls had donated 1 hundred-movie collections to all the children’s departments in Southern California hospitals, they realized they had a question to address: how could they have more of an impact? The answer was clear. They needed to find ways to generate money so they could reach their new goal of providing every children’s hospital and pediatric department in the country with a Kid Flicks “movie library.”

With the help of their father, a lawyer, they applied for not-for-profit status and were on their way. Reporters started calling, their pediatrician distributed information about Kid Flicks in her patient newsletter, and adults and kids started drives that brought in money and movies.

By April 2011, Kid Flicks had donated 58,300 movies to 583 different hospitals across the U.S., from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to Clark Memorial Hospital in Jeffersonville, Indiana—and the number continues to grow.

Romi, the second oldest and now an actor, comedian and screenwriter in New York, is convinced that one reason for Kid Flicks’s popularity is its simplicity. The concept—donate children’s DVDs to hospitals—is easy for anyone to understand and even easier to get involved with.

“It has given me a lot of hope that one small idea can build and gain steam from other people’s support and energy. It has blossomed out of other people’s kindness,” she says, mentioning one child on his birthday who asked that party guests donate DVDs to Kid Flicks in lieu of birthday presents.

Close family far apart

Although all four girls have since grown up to become women living in far-flung locations from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, they remain dedicated to Kid Flicks. Today the movies are shipped to their father’s law office, then brought back to the family home to be stored (in the pool house, the living room and sometimes in their dad’s car) before being delivered. So far there has nearly always been one sister living in L.A. to step in while the others finish school. Yet even while the sisters have been at school, Kid Flicks has been part of their lives to varying degrees.

“The great thing about Kid Flicks is that we can choose when we can dedicate a lot of time to it,” says Marni. “There are four of us working on it, so we can shift who has the bulk of the responsibility.”

The arrangement does seem to work. Back when Marni was an eleventh-grade student and her older sisters were away at college, the Barta sisters won the President’s Volunteer Service Award and were invited to meet the president and tour Air Force One. They visited the White House later that year.

When Marni met the president as he landed in California, her father beamed and told her, “In my fifty years, I’ve never reached a point in my career when I’ve done anything like you have.”

Marni pauses for a moment before finishing the story.

“It just shows that it’s not about how old you are. You don’t have to be a certain age to do something good.”