A HUGE thank you to Girl Scout Troop #3115 for their hard work this past Sunday at the Girl Scouts Day of Service event at Foothill High School! The girls hosted a table to spread awareness about Ethan & Choco’s Book Club and ways that other troops can get involved, such as by fundraising for Read+Think+Thrive Boxes and participating in our charity run. They also designed awesome bookmarks with 10 phrases about reading (aligned with quotes on our silicon Book Bands that patients will receive), and younger girl scouts colored in about 250 — which will be laminated and included in our book boxes to kids newly diagnosed with cancer. They also started a “Team Girl Scouts” on the BOOK IT! registration page —
so other girl scouts can sign up and join their team! The goal of this service day was to mobilize girls to be “agents of change”, and this troop is certainly leading the way through their help with ECBC.
We are SO grateful for their ongoing commitment and partnership for the last couple of years! THANK YOU TROOP #3115!!
THANK YOU to Tarbut V’Torah’s Lower School for such an AMAZING student-led book drive! TVT collected 219 new books in just one week, and this school only has 253 students! Here’s 
Orange County – This is the LAST WEEK of Ethan’s Halloween book drive for ECBC’s Books for Treats event on Halloween at CHOC Children’s Hospital! If you haven’t donated yet, please consider donating a new Halloween book to help us get to our goal of 300 books so kids who are inpatient on Halloween can trick-or-treat for books! Ways to donate are (1) visit Once Upon a Storybook and purchase a book to add to our donation box at the store, (2) put a new book in ECBC’s large donation box by the front office at Arroyo Elementary School, and (3) visit our Halloween Book Drive wish list on Amazon at 
We just received a super awesome book donation!! Twins Amie and Aidan (from Irvine, CA) recently celebrated their 8th birthdays, and they asked for books to be donated to the hospital library that ECBC is building in lieu of gifts for themselves! We met this amazing family on Sunday when they gave us this large, super heavy box of books — 138 new, high-quality paperback and hardcover titles, mostly selected from our Amazon.com Wish List! This is definitely our most significant personal (non-institutional) donation yet! The family even used our logo to make their own ECBC book plates, personalized with the birthday kids’ names and signed by each party guest. Thank you so much Amie and Aidan for thinking of ECBC and for your generosity. We are so very honored!
Thank you Girl Scout Troop #3152 for teaming up with Ethan & Choco’s Book Club for your Bronze Award project!! This awesome troop is holding a book drive to benefit ECBC at Once Upon a Storybook this Sunday from 12:30-5:30. A portion of every book sale between these hours will go to ECBC if you mention Troop 3152 at checkout. Please come by to support the troop’s efforts, ECBC, and our wonderful local bookstore!!
How awesome is this?! A couple weeks ago, fifth graders at Tarbut V’Torah (TVT) organized a book drive at their school book fair, and the Lower School collected a total of 250 new, high-quality books for the library that we are building at CHOC Children’s Hospital! Afterwards, the school invited Ethan to their campus and presented him with the books in a very special school assembly. Afterwards, I sent a thank-you note to the school, and in return I received an amazing note from Laura Roth, the principal of TVT’s Lower School. Principal Roth’s note expressed TVT’s commitment to hold an annual book drive to benefit ECBC and CHOC. We are so excited to have our first Thrive Partner school (a commitment to ongoing annual support)! Thank you TVT! Click here to view Principal Roth’s letter: 
ECBC had an amazing day yesterday at SOCO and The OC Mix in Costa Mesa! We crafted books with the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity and the MaxLove Project. Girl Scout Troop 3115, who is working on their Bronze Medal with ECBC, sold beautiful handmade ornaments and beanies to help fund Ethan’s Read+Think+Thrive Boxes. And with the help of Susie and Once Upon a Storybook, we collected many books for our library collection at CHOC Hospital. It was such a beautiful day in the courtyard at SOCO filled with lots of giving and love! Thank you everyone who participated for making this day a success. And thank you to our OC friends who came by — your support is always so appreciated! 
Today Ethan visited 
We had such a great time at the Orange County Book Festival on Sunday! It was ECBC’s first time being at a public event (beyond our elementary school), and it was amazing to share what we are doing with other book-lovers and our broader Orange County community. We sold some merchandise and received some new book and cash donations, but more importantly we connected with a lot of people and spread awareness about our efforts to bring books to hospitalized kids! Ethan met numerous wonderful local authors who donated their own books, many of whom also expressed interest in being guest author readers at CHOC when we get things going there. Ethan had a blast presenting at the Storyteller’s Stage, where he shared his story and founding of ECBC with a captive audience of young readers and parents and then read aloud one of his favorite picture books. No shyness for this ambassador of reading — his only complaint was that he wanted a bigger stage and a bigger audience! And we were so excited to have a few girls from Girl Scout troop #3115 — who just joined forces with ECBC to help us collect books and other supplies for our new Read+Think+Thrive boxes (reading kits for kids battling cancer who can’t benefit from the hospital library because they are in isolation at CHOC or are at another hospital where they have limited access to books — more on this in another post!). Thank you, girls, for working so hard and collecting over 70 books for the reading kits! And, I think the best part of it all was watching Ethan sit front and center at the booth, proudly telling his story and sharing his cause to everyone who visited. I have no idea how he was able to do this tirelessly for 7 hours in the heat — a true sign of his tremendous commitment to this!
Thank you so much to Peter’s Canyon Elementary School for your fantastic donation of 85 paperback Scholastic books for the ECBG Gifting library! Wow!!! And thank you to 4th grader Gavin for arranging for a book drive at your school!! We are so grateful for your support!!
And, in part 2 of this video, here’s Ethan’s Daily 
