Worthy Options to Make a Difference When You Donate to Children

SocialGood Fund is a powerful nonprofit force in developing projects that support individuals, local communities, and the environment. It offers sponsorships, fiscal support, and fundraising tools to aspiring leaders, which fuels humanitarian causes throughout the country. With the proper fiscal backing through such agencies as SocialGood Fund, individuals are able to pursue their dreams of benefiting others. 

This organization is a lifeline to some of the best charities to donate to, including Chat with Champs, a 501(c)(3) providing walkie talkies to children with cancer in order to minimize the feeling that they are suffering alone. These little “champions” are inspiring to even healthy adults, showing strength and hope that sometimes seems unimaginable. 

Chat with Champs enables individuals to donate to children with serious illnesses.

When 10-year-old Sarah Loza was enduring treatment for stage 4 cancer at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, she was so generous of spirit that she developed a plan to help others who were also in pain. While Sarah’s treatment frequently involved periods of isolation to protect her from infection, the loneliness did not hold her back. In fact, it was one of Rady’s programs that helped to dispel the feelings of isolation that gave her an idea that would lift the spirits of other patients. Rady had a weekly Bingo game where pediatric patients were able to play by hearing the numbers through walkie talkies.

Sarah’s idea was “Chat with Champs,” which is a program to help children connect with each other during their cancer treatments by providing them with walkie talkies. This outreach program strives to never let kids and their families feel alone while fighting cancer.

Chat with Champs helps kids going through cancer treatments by connecting them with a champ. Most kids are hospitalized for weeks and too weak to get out of their rooms, while others will be placed in isolation due to fevers or infections. Some are left alone when both parents are forced to return to work.

No child should fight cancer alone, so anything that contributes to connectivity with others helps to counteract the emotional toll on the kids. The goal of Chat with Champs is to expand the walkie talkie program to include more pediatric hematology-oncology hospitals and spread joy in a time when kids feel isolated, alone and trapped. Their mission is to improve the quality of life of the communities’ cancer warriors, and to bring a level of hope and support to families affected by pediatric cancer.

Efforts to help kids with cancer by minimizing emotional stress are ongoing.

The average age that children are diagnosed with cancer is 6 years old, says CureSearch, a nonprofit foundation that seeks to accelerate the search for cures to childhood cancers. There are 43 children a day diagnosed with cancer, but the good news is that 7 out of 8 kids battling cancer will have the treatment needed to survive, thanks to those who donate to children by supporting such programs as Chat with Champs.

Some of the things that need funding include more expedient medical research and the need for safer, more comfortable treatments for children fighting acute illnesses. The medical community needs more teams of people providing resources and education to lessen the suffering of kids enduring cancer and its treatment programs.

Cancer is the number one cause of death by disease in American children. There is no difference in frequency of cancer between ethnic, economic or gender. The cause also brings together people from every walk of life who seek out the best charities to donate to.

Every year, more than 40,000 kids are receiving treatment for cancer. The range of cancers affecting children include – in order of prevalence:
Leukemia
Brain and central nervous system
Neuroblastoma
Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
Wilms tumor
Bone tumors
Hodgkin Disease
Rhabdomyosarcoma
Thyroid carcinoma
Germ cell tumors
Retinoblastoma
Melanoma
Other

It’s nearly impossible to prevent childhood cancer, says the CureSearch site in an article talking about the challenge of anxiety for pediatric cancer patients.

Treatment side effects sometimes include:
Appetite problems
Constipation
Dehydration
Diarrhea
Fatigue
Fever
Alopecia
Low platelet count
Low red blood cell count (anemia)
Low white blood cell count (neutropenia)
Mouth sores and dry mouth
Nausea and vomiting
Pain
Skin changes
Weight gain or weight loss

Children respond to painful procedures in many different ways, and for parents it can be very difficult to watch their child in the midst of fear and pain. Even though these procedures are necessary for fighting cancer, the child may not understand, because it’s hard to see how something is good for you when it also causes you pain. Helping your child get ready for procedures can make them easier to deal with.

It’s a good idea to prepare a child for medical procedures, including strategies for handling pain and providing them with coping skills. Though practitioners cannot completely eliminate pain in most situations, there are some basic steps you can take to ease pain. It is also helpful to talk with your child’s doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers or pain specialists (if available in your hospital).

Physical Pain

Because pain is subjective — in other words, it’s experienced differently by different people – to gauge the level of pain someone is in you need to talk to them and observe their actions. Since parents know their child best, doctors rely on their feedback to help them understand the child’s pain.

All pain has three parts: biology, emotions and thoughts. They’re intertwined, so feeling nervous, scared or anxious has a strong bearing on how you experience a painful circumstance.

Pain is worsened by negative emotion. You may have observed how young children tend to get fussy as a simple reaction, like the screams from a toddler due to discomfort when she falls down, but it changes in an instant to a complete recovery. With intensive medical treatments, a child may be reacting to the dread of a procedure rather than the physical pain he/she is enduring. Feeling scared and paying attention to the pain makes a big difference in how we experience it.

Emotions
Even healthy adults tend to feel scared or nervous before a medical procedure or any other big event. Professional athletes or performers can experience painful waves of anxiety, even though they’re good at what they do and have rehearsed it thousands of times. They have to learn how to manage their feelings so that they can perform well under pressure.

Have you ever noticed how a professional basketball player takes a big breath when standing on the foul line ready to take a free throw shot?

Parents of a pediatric patient can help their child feel more calm by using methods that the little one finds soothing, such as music or reading. And even more importantly, parents and family members need to stay calm themselves. Because young people read body language, they can see someone grimace when a needle disappears into their arm or they are connected to a machine. Also, when you’re the parent of a patient, staying cool and calm shows that you believe they can handle it.

CureSearch offers other tips you can share with a seriously ill child who’s undergoing a procedure:

• Breathe slowly. We tend to breathe fast and our hearts race when we panic, so you can calm yourself by attempting to slow your breathing. Sharing this tip with a sick child also helps to shift his/her focus onto something besides the procedure – they are thinking about breathing instead of their pain.

• Hold your hand still and make it relax. It’s like giving the child a job. When you ask pediatric patients to find a comfortable place for their hands, which may mean the edge of the bed or a chair, their focus is shifted once again. If the little one’s hand is shaky, you can rest yours on top of it to aid in relaxation. It’s hard to be scared when your hands are calm and relaxed, and sometimes it causes you to slow your breathing also. The child can employ this exercise anywhere and anytime without anyone even noticing, which makes it useful at school to use before tests or presentations.

Thoughts

Before a procedure even begins, sometimes it’s just thinking about how much it’s going to hurt that contributes to a child’s anxiety and, therefore, increasing the pain. During the procedure as well, paying a lot of attention to the pain while watching what is happening can make the pain worse. Here are some ideas to help your child manage his/her thoughts and attention to pain:

• Think about something else. If the child is worrying about the procedure, talk about other things or read a book or magazine, tell stories or sing songs.

• Distraction. An extension of the previous tip, when you find a more engaging focus for the child’s attention, such as a toy, a video, bubbles, etc., it can take him/her away from the pain of the procedure. The best activities for distraction are simple, appealing and require a response so you can easily see if the patient needs more encouragement. Obviously, the activity can’t interfere with the medical procedure (so things that require a lot of action are not good for keeping children still during the procedure). For older children, letting them choose favorite music, magazines, videos or apps can be helpful.

• Go to a happy place. Coach your child to use his/her imagination and pretend to be in a favorite place. The child should relax, breathe slowly, close the eyes and imagine seeing, hearing and feeling something familiar and comforting.

You can join the effort when you donate to children through Chat with Champs.

Chat with Champs began a fundraising campaign and their goal is to raise $20,000 by January 2020. They have currently raised $2,122 to provide patients with walkie talkies. Imagine what more they can do with added support! 

And if you don’t want to pull out a checkbook, you can, of course, make a car donation to Chat with Champs. We don’t always remember that even a vehicle we no longer need has value.

If you’ve been thinking of downsizing to a sedan instead of a gas-guzzling SUV for instance, or investing in a hybrid, you have the opportunity to contribute to the comfort of kids. It’s kind of an irony where everybody wins: You gain the comfort of a car with better features, such as climate control and accident avoidance, with better wi-fi connectivity, while children in isolation get better connected with others and gain the comfort of community.

Of course, a tax write-off is one of the advantages of car donation to charity as well. It’s a really no-fuss method of supporting the cause of kids with cancer, and it requires virtually no effort by you. To make a car, truck or SUV donation to Chat with Champs through Cars2Charities, click here. 

Through SocialGood Fund you can donate to children’s charities and other causes.

The tax benefit an individual gets from supporting Chat with Champs is issued through the nonprofit SocialGood Fund. The 501(c)(3) organization provides fiscal sponsorship of various humanitarian efforts by impacting aspects on several fronts, including:
Administrative back-office support
Bookkeeping and accounting
Human resources
Coaching/consulting

Of course, there are many charities you can donate to. But whether you become a part of their program through direct giving or when you donate a car to charity, fiscal sponsorship is a format for bringing the vision of the pursuits of individuals to life. The social mission of the nonprofit is to promote and cultivate positive influences, which means for various purposes and projects, such as social justice, public art or social change, SocialGood Fund steps in to provide support.

It’s an organization aimed at helping new charitable efforts get started and further their causes. What makes the nonprofit a leader in the field of humanitarian sponsorship is how broadly it sows, in addition to its low administrative costs.

When you support the nonprofit and donate to children, you are impacting their endeavors, such as giving hope to kids with cancer and sharing in the mission of those who seek to make the world a better place.