Kids can dream bigger with this caring charity!

Cause Celeb highlights a celebrity’s work on behalf of a specific cause. This week, we spoke with New York Ranger Dan Girardi about his work with Garden of Dreams.

The Garden of Dreams Foundation is a non-profit charity that works with all the areas of The Madison Square Garden Company. They provide unforgettable events for children who are facing difficult obstacles in their lives. This includes illness, homelessness, poverty, foster care issues and/or tragedy. Since Garden of Dreams was founded in 2006, they have had countless events and activities every year and the enthusiasm hasn’t faded. They have many more events coming up including their annual Casino Night on February 28^th.

Dan Girardi grew up playing minor league hockey in Ontario, Canada. He was a member of the London Knights in 2005 when they won the OHL Championship and the 2005 Memorial Cup. Dan has played for the Rangers for his entire NHL career and he recently earned himself a spot in the 2012 NHL All-Star Game.

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 Interviewed by Meg Zrini

Q: What does Garden of Dreams do?

Dan: Garden of Dreams is a non-profit organization through the Rangers, Knicks, the Liberty, MSG network and Fuze. It usually involves kids and Make a Wish Foundations. Today’s organization is out of Brooklyn. Kids that come from troubled families and we're able to come today and do a nice cool scavenger hunt. I think that Garden of Dreams does a lot of great stuff with kids and we’re always excited to come to events like this.

Q: What is your role with the charity?

Dan: Our role is to go to various charity events and represent the Rangers and the Garden of Dreams in the right way. Especially at an event like this. As an example, we want to come here and have fun with the kids. We don’t really care if media are here to see what we do. We just like coming here and having a good time with the kids and show them a different aspect of life that they haven’t seen before; coming to a museum and doing a scavenger hunt. It’s all relevant to the different events that we do, you know there’s skating parties that we do, toy drives, coat drives, it’s all cool stuff like that to help out with the kids.

Q: Have you been to a lot of these events?

Dan: Yea,  This is my first event at the Museum of Natural History here. I’ve been here for six years now and it’s been ranging from a casino night event that we have every year. It’s February the 28^th. Fans can go buy tickets online at NewYorkRangers.com and that’s always a great event. That’s the big event at the end of the year that people come see us and it raises money for the Garden of Dreams. There’s always coat drives every year and there has been so many different events that hit different aspects of a kids life, obviously kids with some physical problems. It ranges from all over.

Q: Any particular event that sort of stuck out in your mind or a favorite event that you can remember?

Dan: The family dynamics event that Adam Graves puts on, he is a former Ranger and his number is retired here. I’ve been doing that for five years now, every year. It’s one of the ones I enjoy going to. Obviously they’re all great but that’s the one I've been in for the past five years. It’s a group of kids that come in, we play street hockey with them, and play all fun games. At the end there’s a live auction to help raise more money. I think that’s a really cool one.

Q: Anything else you want to add that we’ve missed?

Dan: I think we’ve got it all.