Empowering kids touched by cancer

 
 

Impact

kidsSTRONG is a registered tax exempt, 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation based in California.  kidsSTRONG was established in 2008 by parents who had children touched by cancer and concerned healthcare professionals.  kidsSTRONG is the leading national organization focused solely on accelerating comprehensive cancer care communications and research for kids touched by cancer so all children are inspired, supported,  and empowered to deal with care, treatment and survivorship on their terms.


We are the proud San Francisco Bay Area affiliate of Candlelighters Childhood Cancer Foundation, a national organization based in Maryland.

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kidsSTRONG seeks to dramatically improve the quality of life for children with life threatening medical conditions and their families by enabling and accelerating Family-Centered Care innovation, best practices and standards though patient empowerment and community alliance.

Today, widespread support for childhood cancer is fragmented and uneven.  There is minimal attention on childhood cancer research and many disaggregated sources of information and knowledge.  But, on a broad scale, there is no one organization really focusing on impacting and improving the childhood cancer survivor experience. kidsSTRONG seeks to end the isolation, stop the hopelessness and improve the outcomes, by addressing the vast support disparities across the child/family cancer experience.

We believe that a model of improved communication, collaborative decision-making and access to critical care information among healthcare providers, family caregivers, patients and community support organizations results in trust and improves the overall practice of patient care and quality of life.

Therefore, we measure the kidsSTRONG brand and Alliance on two dimensions we believe are critical to demonstrating the power of leadership and transformative change:

Scale: Our ventures seek to touch the lives of many children and their families, such that scale of their operations begins to approach the scale of the demand from all survivors and communities.  Collectively, the kidsSTRONG Alliance seeks to serve more than 20% of the childhood cancer survivor population, giving our children, their families and our partners a real voice in pediatric healthcare reform and the ability to influence systemic change.

Quality of Life: Maintaining a high quality of life is a vital objective of treatment for all childhood cancer survivors and a precursor to effective healthcare scale.  So, while it is important that our entrepreneurs address scale requirements in childhood cancer, they must all focus first and foremost on providing holistic interventions that promote family well-being across physical, emotional, social, spiritual and school dimensions as measured by a health-related quality of life assessment.  By doing so, they create powerful proof points for new family-centered care model and innovative approaches to closing the gaps.

Outcomes


Additionally, each of our programs is designed with specific outcomes in mind that address key care challenges for children affected by cancer.  Examples of such outcomes are:

  1. •Increased connection with others

  2. •Increased physical activity

  3. •Increased capacity and improved health among caregivers

  4. •Family Centered Care and wellness prioritized in key target markets

  5. •Increase in self/family efficacy for cancer disease self/family management

  6. •Bilingual Education Support