We Give Because Together, We Can Make a Difference.

It all started when…

In 1982, Rhoda Tomasco had a mission. While volunteering in a pediatric cancer unit in Houston, Texas, she witnessed the toll and the sadness that cancer brought to the children and how the hospital treatments dampened their moods. Tomasco knew that the best way for the children to have a smile on their faces would be to step out of the hospital and enjoy a day in the sun. What began with a ski trip with 10 kids to Winter Park, Colorado, flourished into trips across the country. Tomasco founded the Sunshine Kids Foundation nonprofit upon her mission to be a shining light for these children — and for them to simply just have some fun.

Today, the organization holds 10 to 12 national trips a year, working with pediatric oncology units and hospitals throughout the country. Each trip is meant to bring children out of the hospitals, away from their illness and, for one week or so, to allow them to just be a kid. “There are no parents, no siblings, it’s just them,” says Shannon Malone, the director of operations for the Sunshine Kids Foundation. “And they bond over their disease and they just have fun. We don’t talk about cancer, we don’t do research, we don’t counsel. We provide the fun. We get their minds off their cancer.”

Your support allows the trips and experiences to continue, and the bonds between the kids to flourish, and enables the kids to feel like kids again, without a cancer diagnosis. Thank you for that.