Whatever our kids & young adults want to be when they grow up, we find someone who shares their passion, who can give a behind-the-scenes look into the field, and who will be there every step of the way.
We give kids & young adults the agency to explore professions, envision life beyond cancer, and reclaim their identity.
Through our in-person and virtual friendship programs, we’ve paired 3- to 39-year-olds with mentors from 200+ career paths, such as fashion design, robotics, and zoology. Our mentors visit on a weekly to monthly basis through every transition of the cancer journey. Our evidence-based, outcomes-driven approach helps children and young adults better survive the cancer journey — developmentally, psychosocially, and physically.
The moment a young adult or child hears the words “you have cancer,” their life and dreams instantly freeze.
While 85% of young people survive cancer, research shows the psychosocial and vocational side effects can be devastating, and decades long, as a result of intense social isolation. A diagnosis as serious as cancer can freeze a young person’s life and force them to give up future plans in order to focus on treatments. Even after beating the disease, childhood cancer survivors have significantly higher rates of joblessness and depression alongside lower rates of educational attainment and quality of life. Further, due to the overwhelming cost of childhood cancer care, families can plunge into poverty. Cancer doesn’t just impact one’s health; it impacts one’s entire childhood or young adulthood.
Once enrolled in Connecting Champions, we begin the search for the perfect mentor.
Our mentors give a behind-the-scenes & hands-on look at the profession through regular video hangouts, customized internships, and passion project activity kits.
A few examples of passion projects:
– Parts to build and program a robot
– Professional cosmetics to learn makeup design
– Equipment to hunt ghosts
Our visits average 55 minutes and our friendships last an average of 73 weeks.
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Through our virtual and in-person programs, we have paired hundreds of young people in their childhood, teens, twenties, and thirties (in treatment and survivorship) with a diverse network of mentors from over 200 career paths such as fashion, NASA, healthcare, and various trades. Participants meet with their mentors one to four times per month for an average of nine months. We send supplies to drive hands-on learning from the comfort of a hospital bed or home. For low-income and rural participants especially, our virtual programming creates opportunities to discover new career paths that may not be visible in their neighborhood, such as connecting a teen from rural West Virginia with the Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California.
In the words of one of our teens who wants to open her own fish store, “This mentorship allows us to have an escape from the medical world and dive into what we love doing. My passion is so much stronger than it ever has been. I feel like I have a step up now.”
With a Connecting Champions mentor by their side, our participants report that they:
– Feel more in control of their future (93%)
– Learned new skills (92%)
– Kick-started career planning (93%)Â
– Want to be like their mentor when they’re older (100%)
As one of our young adults explains, our organization gives kids and young adults a chance to be more than “a bald head and an IV pole. Connecting Champions gave me the opportunity to look into my future.”
As a low-cost, deep-impact nonprofit, our investment in outcomes allows us to drive impact competitive with much larger organizations.
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Click here to sign up for Connecting Champions or to refer a patient or child/young adult
Click here to contact us about everything else! (Volunteering, hospital partnerships, corporate sponsorships, newsletter, jobs/internships, other)
Or contact Friendship@ConnectingChampions.org / 412.376.3755
