Editor’s Note: As we commemorate Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and launch the #DFYchildhoodCancers campaign, we’d like to introduce you to Katrina Knott, whose daughter, Arianna, is one of the five St. Baldrick’s “Ambassadors” for 2019. As you’ll read in her story, survivorship issues in pediatric cancer need attention – and funding – for those like Arianna, whose challenges are many.
September is here, or as we call it: Childhood Cancer Awareness Month (CCAM) – which, as you’d imagine, is a pretty big deal at the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, the #1 private funder of pediatric cancer research. Every year at this time there are blogs, social posts, invitations to change your Facebook profile or use a hashtag on Twitter related to CCAM – but this year you’ll also be seeing something new.
Although CCAM helps build awareness of pediatric cancers, there’s a need for a more permanent rallying cry. We don’t want September to be one month when people tweet and share Facebook updates about kids with cancer and then move on – after all, somewhere in the world, every two minutes a child is diagnosed with cancer. We purposely created this campaign to bring this reality front and center.
First, though, a little background.
Most of you know St. Baldrick’s for our signature head shaving events, where a shavee raises money and shaves their head to stand in solidarity with kids battling cancer. While these are the most visible, public events, you may not know that we work with other charities and foundations to form partnerships, allowing for more grant funding every year. Currently, we’re working with 7 different charities, and we’ve together raised upwards of $2 million as a result of those partnerships.
One such foundation, the Ty Louis Campbell Foundation, has worked to see research move to clinical trials. You can learn more about one project we’ve worked together to fund at this video.
It’s likely that your first exposure to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation was through a head-shaving event. (After all, the original idea was to get a bunch of executives together to shave their heads around St. Patrick’s Day, raising money for pediatric cancer research.) While head-shaving events remain the foundation’s main form of fundraising, they are just one of many ways to get involved.
Before we look at how a few Honored Kids and their families are making an impact on childhood cancer research through St. Baldrick’s, we should first define the term. An “Honored Kid” is any child, adolescent, or young adult (AYA) who has faced a cancer diagnosis; the more than 5,800 Honored Kids featured on our website bring hope and inspiration to volunteers and supporters of St. Baldrick’s. Once registered as an Honored Kid, each child receives their own page on the website to tell their story. Now, time to be inspired by some remarkable Honored Kids.
Most St. Baldrick’s Foundation supporters know they are making hundreds of childhood cancer research projects possible. They may not realize the research they supported has been published in more than 1,350 research publications since 2005.
We’ll touch on just a few of those here. But first, why are publications important and how do they help find cures for childhood cancer? The answer started long ago.
One of the most vexing problems in pediatric cancer research is trying to find out why certain treatments work for some kids and not for others, or why some kids suffer more health consequences from the same treatment that others do not.
If you’re dealing with something concrete – like plumbing issues in your home, or a car that has suddenly stopped working – it’s usually a trial and error process that will tell you why. Why does the faucet leak? The pipe wasn’t properly tightened. Why did the timing belt go out on the car? Well, those things are only good for so many miles.
Pediatric cancers are much less concrete, and way more complex than plumbing or maintaining a car. And, given the life and death nature of pediatric cancer diagnoses, it’s of vital importance to ask the right questions and get the right answers.
July is Sarcoma Month, and since this is a disease that so often strikes children, teens and young adults, St. Baldrick’s supports a great deal of sarcoma research.
Only about 1% of cancers diagnosed in adults are sarcomas, but they make up 20-25% of cancers between the age of 10 and 20. The most common are osteosarcoma (bone tumors), Ewing sarcoma (bone or soft tissue tumors) and rhabdomyosarcoma (muscle tumors).
Dr. Alejandro Sweet-Cordero is one of many St. Baldrick’s grant recipients tackling sarcomas, and his funding was made possible by our donors in a unique way.
When the St. Baldrick’s Foundation announced its latest grant recipients today – via a press release that you can see here: Press Release – we were pleased to report that more than $17 million was awarded to a total of 55 recipients.
To put that into perspective, we award $27 million toward grants and advocacy efforts this year, so this represents the largest of our funding cycles during the year. (A complete list of the institutions that were awarded grants can be found at the end of this blog post. )
Editor’s Note: We’ve let Jake, the founder of Resilience Gives, tell us his experience of dealing with uncertainty during treatment.
After a few hours of watching carboplatin steadily drip into my bloodstream, I was relieved when my friend Alex poked her head around the corner of the oversized hospital room door. It was day three of my first inpatient stay since beginning my medical leave of absence, and Alex was the first non-family visitor. When she placed her hand beneath the Purell dispenser, I could see a game tucked underneath her arm.
School is out, pools are open, and grills are fired up. Whether you want to make the most of the warm weather or you’re just looking for a way to get the kids involved, make this summer count by raising money to fund research that helps kids with cancer. Here are nine ideas to get you started.
1. Sports Challenge: Take advantage of the summer weather and organize an outdoor tournament with a suggested donation for entering. Take it to the sand for a game of beach volleyball or the park for some of our Summertime favorites like soccer, football, even frisbee golf.
St. Baldrick’s Foundation
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Monrovia, CA 91016 USA
(888) 899‑2253 · sbinfo@stbaldricks.org
The St. Baldrick’s Foundation is a non-profit 501 (c)3 organization, IRS identification number 20-1173824.
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