by Taya Kyle
“The first family we helped was eight years ago,” says Jay. “He’s still in treatment.”
All of this because one little girl decided to open a lemonade stand in her front yard . . . and because thousands of other kids decided to copy her.
But how does that part work? How do kids start fund-raisers to help Alex’s cause?
Like this:
In 2013, a second-grader named Adam—full disclosure, he’s Jim’s nephew—was working at a computer in his classroom when he happened to see a pop-up ad talking about Alex’s Lemonade Stand. Curious, he clicked on the link, and within seconds, he was reading all about Alex and her fight with cancer. Even though none of his classmates or friends had cancer, he was still very touched by her battle with the disease.
Then, reading on, he saw how other kids were raising money to keep her fight alive.
This is a great idea, thought Adam.
So great, in fact, that he wanted to start his own lemonade stand. Maybe at lunchtime, when a lot of kids would be thirsty.
He raised his hand and called the teacher over to show her. She thought it was a good idea, too. She spoke to the principal, and the principal called Adam down to his office.
Was he in trouble?
No way. Just the opposite. The principal wanted to hear Adam’s idea.
As soon as Adam finished explaining, the principal gave it a thumbs-up. The kids in Adam’s class pitched in, as did Mom, Dad, and other parents, donating lemonade and cups. The principal designated a lunch period for the lemonade stand. The kids advertised the event with flyers and by word of mouth. When the day came, the students took turns manning their stand in the cafeteria.
They hoped to get $250. Instead, they raised about a thousand dollars.
Grateful for the donation, Alex’s mom sent Adam a handwritten thank-you—a personal touch greatly appreciated by him, his classmates, and his family.
The event is now an annual one in the district, and after a few wrinkles and adjustments, it has followed Adam to the new school he attends.
Adam offered a few tips for anyone interested in starting their own lemonade stand. First, don’t charge a set price—this way, donations are likely to be higher per cup.
Get your classmates and teachers involved. Adapt to changing circumstances. And if you find a good cause—like childhood cancer—keep at it.
Alex and Adam didn’t start out knowing how their efforts would grow, how long they would last, or what would come of them. They only knew she had an idea and were inspired and wanted to do something with it. As Jay Scott says, “Anybody can make a difference when you set your mind to it.”
Couldn’t agree more.
Alex’s Lemonade Stand makes it easy for children like Adam to not only get involved but to contribute and keep contributing. They can open accounts at the foundation’s website and use those accounts to make and keep track of contributions. When someone wants to support a local lemonade stand but can’t get there to collect their lemonade, that person can go directly to the website and make a contribution.
There’s a lot more on the site, including a blog with entries about researchers and others involved in the fight against childhood cancer. One of our favorites is the story about Dr. Jean Mulcahy-Levy, of the University of Colorado Denver, who is studying autophagy in hopes that it can be used to combat brain tumors. (Autophagy is the process of cell recycling; the body naturally breaks down and recycles cellular material, and it’s possible that this process may be of use in fighting cancer.) There are also stories about kids who have cancer and ways for kids to strengthen their bodies and stay in generally good health.
As the foundation has grown, it has gone beyond lemonade stands. Its own events raise millions each year. It also still gets money from direct donations. Visitors to the website can buy T-shirts, socks, colorful bow ties—as my husband, Chris, would say, half the battle of fighting cancer is looking cool while you’re doing it.
All told, about $20 million is raised annually. A bit under 15 percent goes toward overhead, with the rest being dispersed. Having a nonprofit of my own, let me tell you, that is no small feat.
The battle against childhood cancer is a multifaceted fight. It has to be, because there are a wide range of cancers that primarily affect children. While a great deal of progress has been made over the past several years, much remains to be done.
According to the National Cancer Institute, a little more than fifteen thousand children under the age of twenty are diagnosed with cancer each year. More than 10 percent of them will die.
Alex’s cancer was neuroblastoma, relatively rare compared to leukemias, which are the major type of cancer diagnosed among children. Brain and central nervous system cancers, lymphomas, soft-tissue sarcomas, and kidney tumors are among the most common cancers diagnosed before children reach fifteen.
For comparison’s sake, the most common cancer first diagnosed among adults is breast cancer, with well over 260,000 cases projected in 2018; about forty thousand people are expected to die from it. Lung cancer is the second most common cancer among adults; more than a quarter million cases were diagnosed in 2018, with more than 150,000 deaths expected. These statistics do not count nonmelanoma skin cancers; roughly three million people are diagnosed with some form each year. In general, skin cancers are far easier to treat than others, but several thousand people still die from them each year.
The National Cancer Institute estimates that there are more than four hundred thousand childhood cancer survivors in the U.S. The survival rate for the disease in general has moved slowly but steadily upward. So even though we all know there is much more work to be done, there are very firm grounds for hope.
The “Sweet Feet” Girls
Caressa and Marlee
Kids and lemonade seem to go together, but sweet drinks aren’t the only things kids use to help others. Being resourceful and creative, children come up with all sorts of ways to contribute to others . . . like socks.
Socks?
It’s true. This is a darned good tale.
Sorry for the pun. I’ll put a sock in it from now on, I promise.
It all started a few years ago, when two friends, Caressa and Marlee, were having a sleepover at Marlee’s house in a small Texas town—not too far from where I live, by the way, though I didn’t have the pleasure of hearing about these young women until we started working on this book. Like many ten-year-olds, they were playing with Barbies but for some reason got bored. Dresses, makeup, hair—it did not hold their interest that evening.
What to do?
There was a whiteboard in the bedroom, and they started writing down ideas. One floated above the others:
Help people.
And not just any people. There were two nursing homes in town, and they’d heard that some of the residents were lonely.
Could they help them somehow? Was there anything they could do for them?
The word socks went up on the board.
Hmmmm . . .
The magic of creativity took over, and before the girls drifted off to slumber, an idea was born: they would gather socks and give them out to the nursing home residents. Christmas was coming up, but there would be plenty of activity then; better to make it a present on Valentine’s Day, in the dead of winter, when warmth for feet and hearts might be in shorter supply.
It’s one thing to come up with an idea and quite another to make it a reality, especially when you’re still in elementary school. But Marlee and Caressa shared their idea with their parents, siblings, friends, and classmates; they stood up at church and told the congregants of their idea; they offered it to local businesspeople and teachers.
While a lot of adults thought it was a good idea, it was the manager at the local Dollar Store who really championed it. She helped collect donations at the store and talked it up to anyone who would listen. By the beginning of February, it seemed as if the entire town was in on the project. People donated money or socks—Marlee’s au
nt even sent some from Germany. All told, between two hundred and three hundred pairs of socks were ready to be given out by Valentine’s Day.
On February 14, the girls filled a small wagon and went down the halls of both nursing homes, handing out the socks they’d collected. Some people had also donated blankets, which they gave to residents who couldn’t use the socks for health reasons.
“It was great seeing the smiles on their faces,” says Caressa.
“We love seeing the smiles,” agrees Marlee.
They had so much fun, the girls decided to make it an annual event. They gave it a catchy name—“Sweet Feet”—and it’s become a veritable institution in town.
One year they held a contest at school: the class that gave the most socks would win a prize for their teacher.
The prize was a pedicure. Socks, feet, toes—it was a natural.
Over the years, the girls have become experts on socks. Most of the donations are pretty plain: no-nonsense white. But there have been some extraordinary donations. Socks with little hearts are nice; purple and brown stripes—well, it takes all kinds. Their favorites are thick, fuzzy socks with aloe woven into the threads. On the other hand, many nursing home residents prefer ones with grip pads on the bottom.
Blankets have also become a favorite at the yearly event. These, too, come in many different varieties, including camouflage patterns—a hit with the men, as you’d imagine. There are so many donations that this past year, the girls made up little “goodie bags” with several pairs of socks and a blanket.
In my family, we love crazy socks. When you put on a pair with your business suit, it brings an element of fun to the most mundane activities. I’m already searching for the perfect pairs for this year’s donation. The only thing I know for sure is that I won’t be knitting them myself—that much crazy is too much for anyone.
What I love most about the idea isn’t just that it was thought up by a pair of ten-year-olds—although that in itself is special. It’s that a really simple idea on a whiteboard rippled big in the community, brightening days and encouraging others to be generous. A search for something better than playing with Barbies and, dare I say, cell phone entertainment, turned into a way to show people that they’re not forgotten, which morphed into a town-wide phenomenon—and, in the process, reminds us all of what’s important.
Everyone Deserves a Family
Jim and Lori Word
But for kids to give back to the community, they need to have strong roots themselves. That usually means great parents—which Nick, Ulises, Alex, and many of the hundred I’ve had the privilege of meeting have.
But what about the kids whose parents aren’t there? Whether they’ve passed away or had some other tragedy that prevents them from raising their children? Who helps them?
People like Jim and Lori Word.
Jim and Lori met back in the late 1980s, when they were attending Ozark Christian College in Missouri. They went to the school because they were called to the ministry—and fell in love with each other along the way. Lori was the daughter of a pastor, and as fate or God would have it, her father’s church was in need of some help right around the time the pair graduated.
They went to work there. At the same time, the family was hit with personal strain, as Lori’s mom was diagnosed with cancer, which she soon succumbed to.
Jim and Lori ended up staying at the church and in the area for some eight years, raising a daughter as well as helping the church grow exponentially; Jim describes his job there as a “putty ministry”—he filled the gaps wherever they were needed, whether working with youth or the underprivileged or some other needy segment in the community.
The pair might have stayed there until retirement, except for a phone call from a friend that caught Jim out of the blue one day. It went something like this:
Friend: I need someone to lead the children’s ministry up here in Indianapolis.
Jim: I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you.
Friend: No, actually, I’m thinking of you.
Jim: I have no desire to wear a balloon on my head.
Friend: It’s not like that.
Jim tried to beg off, claiming that he really didn’t think he had a gift for ministering to children. But his friend convinced him that the critical part of the job was supervising the two hundred or so volunteers who worked with the kids.
Somehow, that seemed easier. Or maybe higher powers simply intervened. As Jim puts it, “When God calls you to do something else, you just have to do it. There’s a bit of heartache to it, but you jump . . .”
New town, new job, new responsibilities—but same old enthusiasm and progress. The program grew quicker than an Indy car charging off the line. Though busy with their daughter, Lori worked beside her husband as the church expanded its reach in the community. In fact, to hear Jim tell it, she was the “encourager and butt kicker” in the marriage, using her high energy to motivate him as well as half the congregation and its staff while still focusing on their daughter and the family in general.
And then, their lives took another turn.
In June of ’02, Jim got an email from a church staffer telling them about a little boy from an Eastern European country who’d been adopted by a mother who was now so overburdened she felt she couldn’t go on.
The adoptive mom was desperate—if she couldn’t find someone to take the five-year-old child, she would have to turn him over to the child protective services system.
Could anyone help?
Jim read the email a time or two, then called his wife and read it to her.
“We can do it,” she said immediately. “We can take care of that child.”
In truth, the idea didn’t exactly come out of the blue. Years before, the pair had both sat in on a class for foster parents, at Lori’s urging. Then as well as now there is a tremendous need for foster parents—families who, to generalize a bit, temporarily take in children who either have no parents or, more often, have been taken from their parent or parents for some reason. To throw out some statistics at you, it’s said that there are as many as four hundred thousand kids in foster care (or in need of foster care) in the U.S. The average age is eight, though the population ranges from infant to twenty-one. Foster parents may eventually adopt the children they care for. I wish that were always the case, but that’s not the general rule. Maybe a quarter of the children have relatives as their foster parents; in that case they often stay with the family or are reunited with birth parents. Some portion of the others—there are no firm statistics—will go back to their birth parents or be adopted by families seeking children.
Many, however, fall through the cracks or have to be institutionalized for one reason or another. Their “forever home” is a hard-pressed system that may rotate them through a series of foster families until finally abandoning them as soon as they are considered adults, ready or not—mostly not.
In any case, there are heavy demands on both sides. But the Words weren’t thinking about the difficulties at that point. The decision to act as foster parents came straight from the heart, and within days, their son-to-be had joined the family; because of the circumstances and people involved, he was formally adopted within two and a half months, which is extremely quick, even for a private adoption.
Their son had been born and raised overseas in another country and been institutionalized for his entire life. There were certainly difficulties to overcome, but their experience in the church with other children had given them enough experience to know how to deal with much of those problems.
Not that things always went smoothly. He was—and remains—very high energy.
“When do I get to put him in time-out?” asked the Words’ ten-year-old daughter on his second day with the family.
Far beyond parenting tools like time-out, the Words discovered that the real key to raising a foster or adopted child is patience. You can have all the rules you want, all the understanding you need, and all the prayers in the
world, but patience is what gets you through the day.
Shortly after they adopted their son, Jim and Lori were invited to start a new church—something they’d been contemplating for quite some time. They made their way to Texas, where they started a new church in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, which was underserved at the time. Coincidentally, Jim had grown up in the Plano area, nearly right next door, which made the move a little easier.
Going around the community, they visited different churches, trying to get an idea of what needs weren’t being fulfilled. During one of those visits, a church member complained about their son’s energy level.
That convinced them that their church would have to accommodate high-energy children, whether they were diagnosed with something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or were simply not used to sitting still for adults. That notion evolved to a ministry that took hyperactivity and other things kids do in stride. Beyond that, children with behavior problems, big and small, were welcome as well.
Candidly, not all churches are that accommodating, even in their children’s ministries. But the Words adopted a motto that sums up their attitude: “We have a line item in our budget for paint and spackle. Don’t worry about it.”
But it was adopting their second son, in 2012, that really opened their eyes to the needs of adoptive and foster families. This was another case of an adoption that did not work out. A friend told Lori of a boy adopted from Ethiopia who was in danger of being returned.
“You guys have done this before,” said the friend. “Maybe you would do this again?”
They would. As their first-adopted son said, “Everybody deserves family. Let’s do it.”