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For a child with cancer . . . every day matters
Donate to Help A Child Smile
What do we do with your donation?
The diagnosis of cancer has a huge impact on the entire family. With that in mind, we fund day trips and activities that the whole family can enjoy together. We give every HACS family opportunities to leave the hospital, doctors and procedures behind so they can laugh and just have fun at such outings as:
- African Lion Safari
- Bingemans Big Splash
- Safari Niagara
- Christmas Party
- Emerald Lake
- Hockey games
- Monster Jam
- Stampede Days
- Extreme Motocross
- Fishing Derby
- Disney On Ice
- Magic Show
- Canada’s Wonderland
- Family Picnic
Every family is offered an all expense paid week at Disney’s Give Kids The World Village in Florida, including passes to all of the attractions Central Florida has to offer.
Aside from all of these memory-making adventures, we also help with the costly day-to-day expenses of having a child in treatment. We provide parking passes, gas cards and food vouchers. We subsidize transportation and accommodation costs for families whose child must also go to Toronto’s Sick Kids for treatments that are not available at McMaster. We sponsor monthly parent support groups, teen group outings and bereavement counseling, and we provide the oncology ward and clinic with books, craft supplies, literature, games and more to help them support our families every day.
The costs of providing services for our families can vary widely depending on such factors as type of cancer, length of treatment, number of family members and so on. But based on our calculations, the cost to sponsor a family of four is approximately $3000 dollars per year.
With no government funding or corporate sponsorship, we depend on donations and fundraising to pay for our programs. But having no offices or employees means that almost every dollar we receive can be applied directly to supporting our programs and events – 93.7% to be exact! To see our financial records click here.
We can’t bring smiles to our families without your help. We know that. So we sincerely appreciate your donation and work very hard to make sure that every possible penny directly helps these families dealing with childhood cancer.
Thank you, from them and from us!