Ty Louis Campbell Foundation Gives $25,000 to St. Baldrick’s for Childhood Cancer Research Funding

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Lou and Cindy Campbell of the Ty Louis Campbell Foundation with Zach Semenetz (second from left), St. Baldrick’s Volunteer Event Organizer, and Susan Heard (second from right), St. Baldrick’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Major Gifts.

“Having an Honored Kid every year helps us stay connected to the cause and really show people the true meaning of why we’re there,” Zach said.

This was his seventh year as a Volunteer Event Organizer (VEO) and his ninth time shaving his head for St. Baldrick’s. And this year, his event at Claddagh Bar and Grill in Mahopac, New York, honored Ty Louis Campbell, also known as SuperTy, who died from brain cancer just days after his fifth birthday.

After Ty passed away, his parents, Cindy and Lou, established the Ty Louis Campbell (TLC) Foundation, a St. Baldrick’s nonprofit partner, to fund research and find cures for the most deadly childhood cancers, like the one that took Ty’s life.

At Zach’s event, Cindy and Lou presented a check to St. Baldrick’s for $25,000 from the TLC Foundation so our childhood cancer foundations can work together to fund more research.

Cindy and Lou explained in a statement:

When we decided to launch a nonprofit in memory of Ty, we knew we wanted to focus on funding childhood cancer research in the hopes that someday those efforts will give another child the future that our son didn’t have.

When it came time to invest, we felt a tremendous responsibility to make the best choices — so that every penny has impact — and we realized we needed to collaborate and communicate with other nonprofits that share our mission.

We have long admired St. Baldrick’s for their incredible fundraising and hopeful, cutting-edge research investments. They already have a gold standard practice in place for vetting grant requests from researchers, seeking out the latest findings, and consulting with a team of esteemed medical and research advisers. As partners, the TLC Foundation can leverage their existing tools, knowledge, guidance and foresight, while maintaining the ability to select the individual grants that we wish to co-fund.

It is an exciting time in the childhood cancer community where awareness is turning into action, relationships are building, and nonprofits are collaborating. We are grateful to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation for paving the way.

Although they have been involved with St. Baldrick’s for many years, this was Cindy and Lou’s first head-shaving event. As the day progressed, Cindy said, they grew so impressed by the sheer number of attendees and the overwhelming support for the cause that she and Lou announced the TLC Foundation would give more than $25,000 — they would match the total amount raised by the event.

“It was a spur of the moment thing,” Cindy said. “We thought it would be a fun way to give some incentive for the people in the room to throw in a little bit more.”

And it worked. The event raised $36,075 — more than any year prior.

Cindy said she and Lou are looking forward to reviewing the research grant proposals for the upcoming St. Baldrick’s Summer Grants and choosing the one they would like to help fund.

“We’re excited to see the different options out there and find something that really didn’t seem like it was available when our son was fighting,” Cindy said. “I think we’re at a tipping point for research and there’s a lot of good stuff coming.”

Interested in partnering with St. Baldrick’s to fund a childhood cancer research grant? Contact Susan@StBaldricks.org.

Help pave the way to a cure for all childhood cancers. Fund children’s cancer research.

Give by June 30 and your donation will go toward research being done this year. This is the research that kids with cancer today are depending on.

• Choosing to Smile and Remembering Ty, One Year Later
• SuperTy’s Birthday and a Childhood Cancer Foundation Partnership
• Max and Ty: So Alike, with One Big Difference
• SuperTy – Our Little Fighter