“Established in 2013, Create A Smile was inspired by many stories of children fighting for their lives.
The Why Behind Each Smile
Cancer is a different beast when attacking a child. Hundreds of families find themselves in despair trying to help sustain their child’s attitude as they battle cancer. One of the most difficult challenges is witnessing a family trying to keep a positive mindset while dealing with their own grief and exhaustion. We see how cancer robs a young boy or girl from their childhoods. Create A Smile aims to enhance a child’s life by turning a frown upside down and help as many kids as possible connect to being a kid again by giving them an opportunity to take a break from needles, IV poles, medicine, and feeling the yucky aftermath of chemo.
Most of us have never really been exposed to childhood cancer or know little about it. It’s only if you have lived in a world filled with IV poles, needle pokes and acquired hospital food that one can would understand the negative impacts of cancer. Yet there are over16 thousand children that suffer from childhood cancer.
Here, we’d like to introduce you to a few of those16 thousand children diagnosed with childhood cancer in the southern California. They are very real, and they need our help. They didn’t And we didn’t choose to be born in a country where even the homeless have access to clean water and a toilet.
What started out as a “small” big idea is growing in the Southern California Region. The epidemic of childhood cancer increases every year. Hundreds of families find themselves in despair trying to help sustain their child’s attitude as they battle cancer. We see how cancer robs a young boy or girl from their childhoods. Create A Smile aims to enhance a child’s life by turning a frown upside down and help as many kids as possible connect to being a kid again by giving them an opportunity to take a break from needles, IV poles, medicine, and feeling the yucky aftermath of chemo.
Create a Smile has a simple mission: to help brighten a child’s day by providing them with a gift they request. The gift can be as small as a toy and as big as a two day Disneyland trip. Gifts we’ve granted so far include musical instruments, iPads, game consoles, laptops, electronics, princess parties, limited edition Lego sets, and home renovations. Another concept that is part of our mission is our extravagant ‘Smile Parties’. These intricately themed hospital parties are dedicated to inpatient children who are unable to go home due to their aggressive nature of their treatment.
We invite you to put yourself in their shoes. Follow them on their daily journey. Carry 80 pounds of water in yellow fuel cans. Dig with their children in sand for water. Line up at a well and wait eight hours for a turn.
Now, make a decision to help. We’re not offering grand solutions and billion dollar cancer research to find a cure, but instead, a simple way to that work. Having a happier and more positive outlook while in treatment can even influence the responsiveness of the treatment, so it’s important to help a child feel that they can fight and be strong. That nudge of hope can go long way.