Sugar Hill Outdoors founder Clint Tucker started coaching youth tee-ball years ago, the kind of small-town commitment that has nothing to do with landscaping. His own kids played. So did a boy named Robert Hart, known on the team as "Robert the Great."
Sugar Hill Outdoors began supporting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital because of one boy: Robert "The Great" Hart, a young tee-ball player whose courage facing leukemia still shapes how founder Clint Tucker and his whole crew think about their work, over a decade later, and it still does today.
Robert was diagnosed with leukemia while he was still playing on that team. What follows isn't a marketing story Sugar Hill Outdoors built around a cause. It's the reverse: a friendship that came first, and a company's charitable work that grew out of it afterward.
Robert "The Great" Hart
Robert's teammates and their families remember him for his attitude more than anything else: cheerful, resilient, unwilling to let his diagnosis define him. Over the decade that followed, Clint and his team stayed close to Robert and his family, showing up in ordinary ways: taking him fishing, helping around the house, staying present through a fight that most people only hear about secondhand. Robert died at 16.
That relationship, not a press release or a marketing plan, is the actual origin of everything Sugar Hill Outdoors does with St. Jude today.
Sunshine on a Ranney Day
The first project to come out of that friendship wasn't with St. Jude directly. It was with Sunshine on a Ranney Day, a charity run by Holly and Pete Ranney that renovates homes for children facing serious medical challenges. Their focus is mostly interior work, but the first project Clint's team took on for the charity was a room makeover for Robert himself.
That project is what led Sugar Hill Outdoors to keep showing up for other Sunshine on a Ranney Day families since, contributing outdoor work (accessible garden spaces, backyard areas built around a child's specific needs) as an extension of the same relationship that started with Robert.
Building for the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway
The St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway is a fundraising program: a home builder constructs a house, the public buys raffle tickets for it, and the proceeds go to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. In 2023, Sugar Hill Outdoors partnered with The Providence Group, the builder on one of these homes, to design and build the outdoor living space. Belgard donated the hardscape materials.
The finished space included a paver patio, a retaining wall, a seat wall, and a gas fire pit, built as a real gathering space rather than a showpiece. The broader Dream Home effort that year raised over a million dollars for St. Jude. At the home's floor-signing event, an on-site tradition where everyone involved in the build signs part of the house before it's finished, Clint dedicated the outdoor space to Robert's memory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sugar Hill Outdoors still involved with St. Jude?
Yes. The company has continued contributing outdoor living spaces to St. Jude Dream Home projects since 2023, and continues supporting Sunshine on a Ranney Day families as those projects come up.
How can someone support this work directly?
Through St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Sunshine on a Ranney Day directly, both of which accept donations and volunteer support independent of any one contractor's involvement. Sugar Hill Outdoors doesn't run its own fundraising arm for this work; it contributes design and construction to projects run by those organizations.
If a project like this speaks to why you'd want to work with us
Sugar Hill Outdoors takes on residential outdoor living projects across North Georgia the same way this one got built: a real design process, real materials, and a crew that treats the finished space as somewhere a family will actually live. Contact Sugar Hill Outdoors to start a conversation about your own project.