STATE COLLEGE — What began as one young man’s rough experience in a hospital bed has grown into a literacy-driven community effort aimed at bringing joy, creativity and reading to children facing difficult days of their own.
State College-based Living Water Connections is using comics, graphic novels and a quarterly comic newspaper to help young readers in hospitals and beyond, building a bridge between entertainment and literacy while giving children something positive to hold onto during hard moments.
Through its literacy programming and its “A Kid & A Comic” hospital initiative, the nonprofit is showing how an unconventional idea can become a meaningful community resource.
Justin Behrens, CEO and Director of Living Water Connections, said the project’s roots trace back to his son Adin’s illness.
“It started back when my son got really sick,” Behrens said. “It was Crohn’s disease and he was stuck in a hospital. He felt like there was nothing to do there for him.”
That experience led Adin to imagine something different for kids going through long hospital stays and treatments: a comic newspaper created by artists and writers that could offer both distraction and excitement.
“He developed a comic newspaper where he went around and got all the famous comic artists to write articles like comic strips and developed into a newspaper and then delivered the newspaper to the hospital so the kids had something to read,” Behrens stated.
What started as an Eagle Scout project soon became something larger.
“I was like, ‘wow, this is pretty cool,’” Justin Behrens said. “So we decided to continue it on, start a 501C3 and develop this even more into a project. So now we have two hospitals that we work with, Hershey Medical and Geisinger, and we deliver newspapers to them quarterly.”
On its literacy page, Living Water Connections describes that mission in broader terms, with programs centered on community literacy drives, graphic novel mentoring and A Kid & A Comic — Hospital Edition, which brings comics and storytelling to young patients.
For Adin Behrens, the inspiration was deeply personal.
“I was still brainstorming a lot because when I was in the hospital, my eagle project was not necessarily the first thing on my mind,” he said. “It was pretty rough. I did not enjoy being there.”
But after leaving the hospital and thinking about the other children he had seen there, the idea began to take shape.
“I feel like they were feeling the same crappy way that I was,” Adin said. “So I kind of thought about my eagle project as before I was even in contact with Living Water Connections. I was thinking it would be a cool idea to create a comic book for kids in the hospital.”
He added that he wanted to create something memorable and meaningful.
“I really wanted to do a unique project,” Adin said. “I didn’t just want to build a bench and be done.”
Justin Behrens said the program has since expanded beyond hospitals into literacy work for children who may struggle with traditional reading methods.
“We do literacy through comic books,” he said. “We found out that kids that have a hard time reading and comprehending stories, we decided that we wanted to see if it’s true that comics or graphic novels are an alternative way for kids to learn literacy.”
That includes an after-school model where students read graphic novels, work on comprehension and even create their own endings and illustrations with help from artists and writers.
“And sometimes we get them published,” he said.
Adin said comics can be especially powerful because they lower the barrier for reluctant readers.
“I think comic books are a great way to get kids into reading because it is something that I think has a lower barrier of entry to people who aren’t as into reading,” he said. “I think it’s a great thing to sort of bridge that gap.”
The response, according to Justin Behrens, has been strong from both hospital staff and children.
“The hospital workers love it because it’s the comic people that they read,” he said. “As for the kids, they love it because it’s something else different.”
The newspapers, which Justin Behrens said run about 13 pages and are printed in batches of about 5,000, also include games like word searches and mazes, giving young readers even more reason to keep turning the pages. He said the long-term vision is much bigger.
“That’s our number one goal, is we want it across the country,” he said. “We want to get more hospitals on board with this.”
For Adin, though, the heart of the project remains simple.
“If I can just give a kid 15 minutes of time just to distract themselves from the monotony of the hospital and just have a good time reading a comic book, I think that really is the goal I really care about,” he said. “And if I can just give a kid some joy, that to me is so much. It holds so much importance for this, the motivation behind this project.”
For more information, visit livingwaterconnections.com
