Welcome To My Fundraising Page!

I am honored to be participating in The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) 2020 Students of the Year (SOY) campaign as a part of Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart’s Gators Beat Blood Cancer team. The LLS SOY campaign is a seven-week initiative in which high school students, like myself, participate in a national fundraising competition to benefit LLS’s mission: finding cures for leukemia (the most common form of cancer in children and teens), lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma and helping to improve patients’ quality of life. 

I am raising funds in honor of my Stone Ridge classmate Meghan Kilner who thankfully is currently in remission from Hodgkin's lymphoma. As a team, our mission is to raise money for this extremely worthy cause and to educate on just how vital it is to fund life-saving blood cancer research. I am asking for your help on this journey by making a tax deductible donation. With your donation, you are not only supporting LLS' research, but also patient services, advocacy, public and professional education, and community services. Together, we can and will find a cure!

Because of campaigns like Students of the Year, LLS has seen tremendous success discovering new and more effective treatments for blood cancer patients and has created a new exciting initiative focusing on treatments for pediatric patients.

• LLS funded 43 of the 49 FDA approved treatments for blood cancer patients since 2017
• Since 2000, more than 40% of the new cancer therapies approved by the FDA started as blood cancer research
• In 2019, LLS established The LLS Children’s Initiative, a comprehensive $50 MILLION multi-year endeavor, to help children with cancer through every facet of LLS’s mission:
  • More than doubling our investment in pediatric cancer research grants
  • Expanding education and support service for children and their families
  • Advocating for and driving policies to accelerate the development of new treatments and break down barriers to care
  • Launching LLS PedAL (Pediatric Acute Leukemia), a groundbreaking global precision medicine clinical trial in acute pediatric leukemia

The treatments developed for blood cancers are now helping people affected by many different types of cancer and diseases. This is because cancer cells in the blood are more accessible than those in solid tumors, making it easier to study cancer-causing molecule and to measure the effects of a treatment. Blood cancer research is leading the way. 16 FDA-approved drugs for blood cancers are commonly used to treat patients with other cancers such as breast cancer, brain cancer, kidney and liver cancer. In addition, LLS funded drugs are now being tested for patients with other non-cancerous diseases like Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis and Multiple Sclerosis.

Please pass along the link to anyone who might be able to donate to this incredibly inportant cause! On behalf of blood cancer patients everywhere, I thank you for your support!

If you are unable to make a donation at this time, there are still other ways to support and learn more about the cause! To do so, please visit www.LLS.org.