Hello Friends and Family!

It's Haley Smith and I am honored to be participating in The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) 2020 Students of the Year (SOY) campaign, a seven-week initiative in which high school students from around the country are nominated to participate in a fundraising competition to benefit LLS’s mission: to find a cure for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma, and to improve the quality of life of patients and their families.

I am fundraising in memory of my grandparents, Dorothy Kee and Carl Smith, who both lost battles to two different kinds of blood cancer.  Each dollar is a vote and the team that raises the most money at the end of the seven weeks is named Students of the Year.  I am a candidate (leader) of a fundraising team called Knock Out Blood Cancer which is also led by my two friends, Ellie Huppe and Anna Hemmer.  As a team, our mission is to not only raise the most money but also to bring attention to blood cancers like leukemia, which is the most common form of cancer in children and teens.

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

And many LLS supported therapies not only help blood cancer patients but are now used to treat patients with rare forms of stomach and skin cancers. They're even being tested in clinical trials for patients with a range of cancers including lung, brain, breast, pancreatic and prostate cancers. LLS funded drugs are now being tested for patients with other non-cancerous diseases like Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis and Multiple Sclerosis.

Please join me in supporting my campaign and LLS by making a donation to my fundraising campaign. Thanks to your support, my efforts, will help fund the therapies and treatments and help save lives today.LLS's continued advancements over the years, are responsible for the blood cancer survival rate doubling and tripling; in some cases, the survival rate has even quadrupled.

All donations are greatly appreciated and are tax deductible. With your donation, you’re not only support LLS research but patient services, advocacy, public and professional education, and community services as well. Together WE CAN FIND A CURE!Please visit my fundraising webpage(s) often and pass along the link to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc. who might donate!  I recognize I need lots of support to reach my fundraising goal!

On behalf of blood cancer patients everywhere I thank you for your support!

For more information about LLS, please visit www.lls.org