Striving to make access to books and reading a core part of the care that kids receive in the hospital, with the premise that literacy support for children fighting cancer and other life-altering conditions can help promote cognitive health and social connections that are part of thriving through treatment and beyond
It was so wonderful to celebrate ECBC’s outstanding group of bedside readers at our CHOC volunteer thank you dinner last night. I feel so blessed to have had such amazing team — current and retired educators, reading experts, psychologists, and librarians — who did the work of our mission in the best way possible. Together, they engaged patients in thousands of hours of bedside read-alouds and gifted tens of thousands of high-quality books. Together, they were able to yield an impressive 70% “yes to reading” rate by patients — 7 out of 10 kiddos saying yes to a read-aloud — which far surpassed the expectations we had at the launching of the program. And more than half of teens and young adults agreed to a read-aloud, truly astounding for this demographic! These impact numbers are incredible and are a testament to the passion and commitment of our volunteers. I am so grateful for this team and will miss them dearly!
One thing that became clear as this group reflected on their time at CHOC is that impact did not only go in the direction of volunteer to patient. The volunteers all shared stories about how the experience of being a bedside reader impacted them personally and added meaning to their life. What an incredibly special thing to hear as we said goodbye!
Thank you CarterStrongForever for your Recent CarterStrongForever Bucket List Book Drive and the books you just donated to ECBC. This is CarterStrong’s last donation directly to ECBC as a nonprofit entity, so we’d like to express how much we’ve cherished the partnership with the Ankeny family and CarterStrongForever for the past nine years. We remember back to 6-year-old Carter’s first Bucket List Book Drive in 2017, just after he relapsed, and the awesome 700 books that we received. After that initial donation, ECBC created a CarterStrongForever wish list of 100 titles to represent Carter — his kindness, humor, bravery, love for baseball, and love for superheroes especially Captain America. It has been such an honor to be able to play a tiny part in carrying on Carter’s legacy by sharing Carter’s books with hospitalized patients — especially oncology kiddos. Thank you CSF for letting ECBC help to celebrate Carter over the years.
And, we look forward to helping to continue to share Carter’s favorite books in the future through an ECBC funded outpatient Book Nook at CHOC — more on this to come!
Thank you Arvida Book Co and Arvida Foundation, and Sam, for making the process of dissolving ECBC (and moving thousands of books) do-able and surprisingly easy. We are so grateful for you. Storage unit cleared — step 1 of book transport done. Next up — my living room and our friend’s warehouse. Dave and Josh, you were life savors today! And Susie, a life savor always. Thank you Arvida!
Friday was ECBC’s last day at CHOC Children’s Hospital, where we hosted our annual BOO-ks for Treats as part of CHOC’s Halloween event. As we have every year at this event, we gave away hundreds of new Halloween-themed books. One thing we’ve prided ourselves on for the past ten years of book gifting is highly nuanced curation of titles — with books for not only every patient age but also kids’ varying interests and genre preferences. This has made it more likely that we meet patients’ nuanced reading preferences — allowing them to select books they are are excited about and increasing the likelihood that they actually read! Remarkably, even every teen and young adult selected a book — whether it be young adult horror or Edgar Allen Poe in graphic novel form or scary short stories or Latin American monster stories for teens. And we heard the best reactions — multiple kids saying “they saved the best for last” (ECBC was the last booth on the 40-table trick-or-treating circuit) and several saying they were excited to go up to their room to read their new book. How good it feels to hand out “brain candy” to sick kids on Halloween!
Thank you to NCL North Tustin, Arroyo Elementary School, and our Amazon wishlist donors for helping to make our last event a great success. We are especially thankful for those of you who did a final grand donation of many books! And thank you to El Dorado High School’s Books 4 CHOC club and FHS’s California Scholarship Federation for the beautiful handmade Halloween cards that we passed out along with the books. And a special thank you to Susie and Julie for being there today, and from the start of ECBC to the very end. I am so grateful for you both!
Having BOO-ks for Treats as ECBC’s last activity at the hospital was a full-circle moment for ECBC co-founders, myself and Ethan. Halloween at CHOC was the first event we attended as patients in 2014, just after being diagnosed with high-risk Leukemia . Ethan dressed up as a hip hopster and trick or treated with his siblings (pre-ECBC , so without a booth giving away books!), and later that same day he had surgery to place his port in his chest and begin chemo. So this felt like a perfect way to end ECBC, saying goodbye with our most personally meaningful event.
While we are sad ECBC is done, we are focusing on celebrating a decade of impact through the thousands of hours spent reading at patients’ bedside and the tens of thousands of books we gifted. Now, we turn to the more tedious work of dissolving the nonprofit.
Today, ECBC closed the chapter on its inpatient literacy programming at CHOC Children’s Hospital, with two of our loyal retired educator volunteers completing the last of 1124 volunteer shifts and tens of thousands of books gifted on the inpatient side of the hospital over the past decade. Per ECBC’s usual routine, today’s volunteers started with the mobile gifting cart, giving away a bunch of terrific books to kids in isolation who are stuck in their rooms, followed by visiting non-isolation patient rooms with ECBC’s Read-Aloud Wagons and offering Halloween-themed storytime at patients’ bedside.
At the end of the shift, as bedside reading supplies were being cleared out of the storage cabinets, a mom and her teenage oncology patient daughter entered the room, asking how they can get a book and what days the book cart visits patient rooms. As I explained that this was ECBC’s last day of this program, it was tough to get their disappointed response– the teen loved books, “especially comic style”. I offered her to pick some books from the cart to keep, and she excitedly chose two graphic novels written for teens/young adults…she was grateful and left the room smiling. This program is difficult to say goodbye to because I so deeply know (from first-hand experience and scientifically) how valuable high-quality interactive read-alouds and high-quality literature is for patients, especially those stuck in the hospital with long-term stays. One of my very greatest joys is sharing quality and compelling books with kids, especially kiddos who wouldn’t otherwise have access to them. I will certainly miss being able to do this.
And tomorrow, we turn to ECBC’s BOO-ks for Treats at CHOC’s Halloween event — our very last ECBC event.
Yesterday, ECBC re-stocked its outpatient libraries at CHOC’s Outpatient Infusion (OPI) Center and at the Hyundai Cancer Institute (oncology clinic) for the last time, delivering 550 new Halloween-themed books for all patient ages and across many genre types.
This was a bittersweet “last” for sure, as this aspect of ECBC has been one of the greatest joys amongst ECBC’s numerous programs. Outpatient book gifting wasn’t part of ECBC’s original mission to bring books and literacy support to CHOC patients — which generally meant children on the inpatient side with life-altering treatment and lengthy hospital stays. In the early days of ECBC, the extras were given to the outpatient side, more as an afterthought. When Covid hit, all of our inpatient programming was halted, including our inpatient book gifting — whereas outpatient welcomed the donations and so we established it as a regular program, creating gifting cart libraries and providing monthly donations.
Over the past many years, ECBC has gifted more than 30,000 new books to OPI and the oncology clinic. We are so proud that patients came to expect the opportunity to select a new, high-quality book as a regular part of their outpatient experience. The best part has been the patient and parent testimonials — mostly in the form of social media shout-outs and emails — sharing their gratitude for specific books, for inspiring their kiddos to read, and even for contributing to school reading awards. We are currently working with these outpatient centers on how to help them continue to offer books to patients and look forward to reporting on that in the near future.
Thank you to all of our donors who have made our outpatient book gifting programs possible over the years. And a huge thank you to outpatient nurse manager Ali Langdon for embracing the value of books for patients and making space in her busy world to support our program — from regularly informing us of specific numbers of books needed for each book type, to organizing philanthropic book drives in the community, to literally carting boxes of books from the parking garage to inside the hospital– Ali made the partnership easy and wonderful.
And finally, we still need a couple hundered more books for next week’s final inpatient event — BOO-ks for Treats on Halloween day. If you haven’t had a chance to donate yet, please consider doing so one last time at https://bit.ly/Halloweenbooks4ECBC or by clicking on Amazon image below
Thank you NCL North Tustin for hosting yet another book drive, this time a Halloween book drive, and your usual amazing results! ECBC just received NCL’s donation of 258 new books — 236 of them specifically Halloween-themed for ECBC’s upcoming Halloween book gifting events at CHOC. Also, every book came with a handmade Halloween-themed bookmark, many of them so beautifully done!
A special thank you to Ali, Kendall, and Haley Langdon for organizing the book drive, collecting/bookplating/sorting the books, and delivering them!
THANK YOU NCL for your ongoing support of ECBC! Over the past several years, you have donated more than $11,000 worth of new books; you have helped CHOC patients to read, think, and thrive through life-altering treatment and long hospital stays. We have so appreciated you!
Thank you Arroyo families who purchased Halloween books for ECBC at your book fair last week! We have so appreciated Arroyo’s support for ten consecutive years! If any Arroyo families didn’t get a chance to donate a book and would like to, we still need a few hundred more! Click HERE to donate!
ECBC’s final month of bedside reading and book gifting — Halloween themed! Each wagon carries 30 favorite Halloween-themed books for storytime at patients’ bedside, with our usual five books per age group so that we can offer appropriate and engaging read-alouds for all patient age groups, infant through young adult. Please consider donating a Halloween book to help us with our Halloween- themed book gifting
Please help ECBC celebrate ten years of impact at CHOC Children’s Hospital by supporting Ethan’s LAST Halloween book drive and ECBC’s LAST book gifting event — BOO-ks for Treats! Click below to hear from Ethan.
THANK YOU Hicks Canyon Elementary School for conducting yet another book drive for ECBC, and for the 80 terrific books that you donated this week! This was your 4th consecutive year collecting books for ECBC, and at two book drives per year — your seventh book drive! Your commitment to helping our cause has helped us so much the last several years, and we are so grateful! A very special thank you to Tina Jussal for making this (and every) Hicks book drive happen! #thrivepartnerschool #books4CHOC #readthinkthrive #thriveagainstcancer
After much contemplation and discussion, the board of ECBC has made the difficult decision to dissolve Ethan & Choco’s Book Club. Over the past ten years, ECBC has helped patients thrive through treatment at CHOC Children’s Hospital, with both inpatient and outpatient literacy and book gifting programs. Our bedside readers have faithfully read to thousands of patients, and we have donated tens of thousands of new, high-quality books to cancer warriors and other patients — specially curating the books to meet the diverse needs and interests of patients of all ages infant through young adult. We hope we have made their difficult life circumstances more bearable and enriched their cognitive health with support for literacy and thinking skills that is so often missing from hospitalized children’s experiences. We are thankful we had the opportunity for a full decade of impact on the lives of patients and their families at CHOC Children’s Hospital.
Despite our robust literacy programs at CHOC, the Outpatient Infusion Center, and the Hyundai Cancer Institute clinic, we have been faced with rising costs and significant obstacles at the hospital that have prevented us from fully fulfilling our mission. During the past two years, we have been unsuccessful in securing ongoing funding to support our program needs, maintaining engagement for our work in our online audience, as well as growing our board in the way that is necessary for a nonprofit to function. Also, as our co-founder, Ethan, has embarked on his college adventure at Duke University, his participation in the organization has become more challenging. In the past year and a half, the work of running the organization has been delegated to just a couple of people. Given these challenges, now seems like a logical time to bid farewell.
It takes a community to make a nonprofit successful, and your faithful participation was such a blessing to us! We were always encouraged by your loyalty to ECBC and loved doing social media and newsletter shout-outs to thank you for your incredible support. You donated books, hosted your own book drives, “ran for reading”, dressed up as your favorite literary character, recruited event sponsors, held birthday and memorial parties asking for books instead of gifts or flowers, rallied youth groups around our cause and made thousands of support materials (e.g. custom book marks and holiday cards), and as you shared the work of ECBC, it brought in new supporters. Your impact was significant and meaningful, and it kept us going for many years!
October will be our final month of literacy programming – with Halloween-themed bedside reading and book gifting both inpatient and at the outpatient centers. Our final day at CHOC will be Friday, Oct. 31, for BOO-ks for Treats, our annual event where we give away hundreds of Halloween books to children hospitalized at CHOC. This is a fitting way to go out, as Halloween was Ethan’s first event at CHOC – he dressed up in costume and trick-or-treated on the same day that he started chemo! Ethan will soon be sharing a video asking for one last book donation in order to support this event.
Thank you, ECBC community, from the bottom of my heart for sticking with us for so long and allowing us to spend a decade helping hospitalized kids to thrive through books and literacy experiences.
Please check out Ethan’s last Wishlist Fundraiser, his online book drives that he has been conducting since 2016! To donate a book in honor of his final book drive and the tens of thousands of books that his online book drives have brought to hospitalized kids over the years, go to: https://bit.ly/wishlist_booklooks. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported Ethan’s virtual book drives to help him to get books and reading to kids battling cancer and other life-altering illness!
The time has come for Ethan to close the chapter on Teens Thrive Reading Group (TTRG), his virtual book club for teen oncology patients and survivors. Here are the brief words that he shared with his private Instagram-based group a few days ago.
From Ethan: “After nearly four and a half years, and now that I am headed off to college, I am sad to say that I am shutting down Teens Thrive Reading Group. First and foremost, thank you to everyone for participating. Throughout cancer treatment, reading was extremely important to me. But it has remained an important part of my life long beyond that, providing an escape from the world and a window into new ones that social media or YouTube could never replicate. If there is one thing you got from this club—whether you read one book or many—I hope you will continue to make reading a part of your life as well. To honor the end of this club, we are offering everyone a free book of your choice. DM us which one you’d like. Later 👋”
Ethan launched TTRG in September 2020 to appeal to teenage and young adult patients at CHOC, especially those who may be interested in a literature-based activity but who may not be excited by the read-alouds provided by our bedside readers. He ran it for 51 consecutive months, selecting 51 featured books of the month that participants could receive for free (along with free Kindles) and curating 51 book discussions. It has been a good run, until recently when most members have grown up and grown out of the group (and survived cancer!)…with Ethan off to college, it is time to move on. After Ethan’s goodbye message to the group, one member wrote” ” Thank you for keeping this group going for as long as it did. It certainly made our days a lot more enjoyable”. We thank our initial funders of this program — Rexford Industrial, Mark Latimer/the Larry and Helen Hoag Foundation, and John and Kathleen Collins — and all the donors along the way, for making it possible for ECBC to offer this program for the past 4+ years.
THANK YOU to National Charity League North Tustin for your June book drive and your INCREDIBLE effort! ECBC just received NCL’s donation of 444 new books of EVERY type, including board books, picture books, learn-to-read books, nonfiction/information books, graphic novels, easy chapter books, middle grade chapter books, teen/YA books, Spanish-language books, and poetry! Also, every book came with an inserted beautiful handmade bookmark — a bookmark per book is such a cool gesture that we’ve never received before! And a special thank you to Ali, Kendall, and Haley Langdon for organizing the book drive, collecting/bookplating/sorting the books, and delivering them! We so appreciate NCL North Tustin’s ongoing support!
Thank you to Canyon High School for your recent donation of 116 new books, and a big thank you to Canyon’s Babysitters Club for their great efforts in organizing a book drive at their school! The Babysitters Club promoted the book drive, made nine colorful donation boxes to place around campus, worked with teachers to set up incentives, and organized and delivered the books. We can’t wait to get these awesome books to patients at CHOC next week!
Thank you Arvida Book Co and Arvida’s amazing customers for the 132 new books they donated last month! These books came in as a result of Arvida’s “flash tattoo” fundraiser to celebrate Independent Book Store Day (donate a book, get a free flash tattoo) as well as an in-person visit by best-selling children’s author Stuart Gibbs (where a generous customer purchased a large number of Gibbs books to donate). Arvida is one of ECBC’s few long-standing community partners that hosts regular book drives for ECBC, and we appreciate their support so very much!
Please check out Ethan’s monthly Wishlist Fundraiser for board books! You can listen to Ethan’s video below to learn more. To donate a book, click on the link below or go to https://bit.ly/wishlist_boardbooks.
To become an ECBC GEM (Give Every Month and commit to a monthly donation, clickHERE.
Thank you for helping Orange County’s hospitalized kids to thrive with high-quality books and reading experiences!
ECBC just completed our monthly delivery at CHOC Childrens Hospital’s Outpatient Infusion Center (OPI) and the Oncology Clinic, re-stocking the bins of our gifting library carts with 515 new books. As usual, we filled the bins with books of every type (e.g., graphic novels, nonfiction, poetry and much more) and for all patient ages ranging from infant to young adult. We love re-stocking our gifting libraries each month and knowing that oncology patients are selecting high-quality books to keep (and hopefully read!) each time they visit the hospital! #outpatientdeliveryday #outpatientlibraries #bookeveryvisit #readthinkthrive #thriveagainstcancer
Please check out Ethan’s monthly Wishlist Fundraiser for books with disability representation! You can listen to Ethan’s video below to learn more. To donate a book, click on the link below or go to https://bit.ly/wishlist_disability. Also, as always, we are in great need of board books and need to purchase them on a weekly basis, so we always appreciate getting these donated!
To donate a book with disability representation, click HERE.
