CCA's award-winning Chemo Pal Mentor Program gives kids a caring, trusted, adult friend to look forward to during treatments, and someone in their corner when they need it most.
There are no friendships quite like the friendships of our childhood. But serious illness is like an invisible wall, isolating kids from their from their friends and school activities. When a child is diagnosed with cancer or other serious illnesses, they lose this valuable peer-to-peer contact and their adult interactions tend to center only around their disease and treatment program.
Chemo Pal mentors are carefully screened, trained, and thoughtfully matched with families. They play games, listen to music, share hobbies, or simply offer the comfort of companionship, relieving the anxiety, loneliness and isolation experienced by children in treatment. They can also give parents a much-needed break. CCA's Halo Buddy Program is an extension of our award-winning Chemo Pal Mentor Program for kids going through halo traction.
This year, CCA delivered the joy of friendship to over 200 Pacific Northwest children and teens and our Chemo Pal matches spent 6,190 hours together having fun.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
