Striving to make access to books and reading a core part of the care that SuperKids receive in the hospital, with the principal premise that literacy support for children fighting cancer and other life-threatening conditions can help promote cognitive development and social connections that are part of thriving through treatment and beyond
If you haven’t donated to Ethan & Choco’s Book Club yet this year and are looking to make an end-of-year gift before January 1, you can still do so now! CHOC Children’s is beyond full capacity with playrooms and other social spaces converted to patient rooms; cancer diagnoses are at an all-time high for the hospital; and most of ECBC’s programs have returned to or surpassed their pre-Covid levels of operation — so donations are greatly needed to meet the significant demand. All donations will go directly towards helping hospitalized kids (especially kids battling cancer and other life-altering conditions) thrive through treatment with high-quality books and read-aloud experiences. For example, a $20 donation may buy a book for a child who is inpatient on the oncology floor; a $150 donation may provide a book bag containing a mini-library of age and gender appropriate literature for a child just recently diagnosed with cancer; and a $250 donation may provide a Kindle and monthly Kindle books for a teenage oncology warrior. All donations are tax-deductible, and donors are acknowledged on the items they fund. You can CLICK HERE to donate: Please email Ali@ECbookclub.com for a donation receipt.
A big thank you to the Jack & Jill Guild of CHOC Children’s Hospital for a successful “Happy Hour Book Drive” yesterday at Arvida. In just a couple of hours, many awesome new books were purchased and donated (number TBD, since many were ordered online), which will get delivered to patients over the next few weeks. ECBC so appreciates the Jack & Guild’s ongoing support! A special shout out to Hoppy Meyer for her work coordinating the event. And thank you to Arvida owners Sam and Mike for partnering with ECBC to help provide books for patients at CHOC!
Arvida collects book donations for ECBC on an ongoing basis, so please stop by the store if you can to purchase a new book to donate! It’s a huge win-win for all as you will also be supporting a truly awesome local Tustin independent bookstore with new and used books, a very cool coffee bar with terrific coffee, and cozy seating to hang and read and chat!
THANK YOU for your support in helping hospitalized kids to thrive through the holidays with books and reading!
We had so much fun this morning at Tiddlywinks in the Orange Circle, where Ethan led a storytime along with The Potting Shed owner Jack! Thank you to the kiddos (and their parents and grandparents) who attended, and THANK YOU to Tiddlywinks owner Jeannie for inviting Ethan to read. Tiddlywinks is hosting a book drive for ECBC for the month of August, so if you’re in the area, please consider stopping by this wonderful toy (+book) store to purchase a children’s book to donate!
We are so excited that the December holiday book drive at Arvida has turned into a regular thing! Arvida now has a book donation box for ECBC, so you can visit the store to purchase a children’s book to donate — as well as enjoy everything else the store has to offer, including a terrific selection of used and new adult books, locally made gifts and art , wonderful coffee, cozy seating and tables with chess games, and numerous in-person events such as book clubs and writers’ workshops. Purchasing a book here to donate is a win-win for ECBC, Arvida, CHOC Children’s Hospital, and our community! Bookplates are available at the store for donors to write in their name. Please remember that all books purchased for ECBC must be brand new!
If you haven’t donated to Ethan & Choco’s Book Club yet this year and are looking to make an end-of-year gift before January 1, you can still do so now! Most of ECBC’s programs have returned do their pre-Covid levels of operation, and all donations will go directly towards helping hospitalized kids (especially kids battling cancer and other life-altering conditions) thrive through treatment with high-quality books and read-aloud experiences. For example, it may buy a book for a child who is inpatient on the oncology floor; or it may provide a book bag containing a mini-library of age and gender appropriate literature for a child just recently diagnosed with cancer; or it may fund a Kindle and Kindle books for a teenage oncology warrior. All donations are tax-dedictible, and donors are acknowledged on the items they fund. You can CLICK HERE to donate: Please email Ali@ECbookclub.com for a donation receipt. #endofyeargift #ECBC #readthinkthrive #thriveagainstcancer #cognitivehealth
Thank you TVT Lower School for hosting a book drive for ECBC again this year alongisde your school book fair! The book drive was a great success, with TVT students donating 266 terrific new books spanning all of the categories we need and including many high-demand titles. Thank you to the 5th graders for their hard work in promoting the book drive, and thank you to the team of parents who helped to coordinate it (Nuriya Ismagilova, Galina Kerenskaya, Christine Groner, Jessica Ardo, Andrea Katz). And a special thank you to TVT student and Leukemia survivor Liam Katz for delivering the books to us again this year!
We are so grateful for TVT for their annual support since ECBC’s first year of bookraising in 2016. Each year they have held tremendous book drives that are promoted by the students and that result in 200+ books — having raised well over 1000 books over the past five years. THANK YOU TVT for continuing to be a thrive partner school and being such an amazing model for how kids and schools can make a difference for other kids in our community!
A big THANK YOU to Arvida Book Co and the Jack & Jill Guild of CHOC Children’s Hospital for a successful “Happy Hour Book Drive” yesterday at Arvida! In just a couple hours, 108 awesome new books were donated, including many holiday-themed books that will get delivered to patients over the next few weeks. A special shout out to Hoppy Meyer for her work coordinating the event. And a huge thank you to Arvida owners Sam and Mike for partnering with ECBC to help provide books for patients at CHOC!
Arvida will be collecting book donations throughout December, so please stop by the store if you can to purchase a new book to donate! It’s a huge win-win for all as you will also be supporting a truly awesome local Tustin independent bookstore with new and used books, a very cool coffee bar with terrific coffee, and cozy seating to hang and read and chat!
THANK YOU for your support in helping hospitalized kids to thrive through the holidays with books and reading!#holidaybookdrive #arvidabookco #ECBC #readthinkthrive #thrivingthrutheholidays #thriveagainstcancer #cognitivehealth
Today we dropped off BOO-ks for Treats bags for 200 patients (each bag filled with two Halloween-themed books curated by age and gender) to CHOC Children’s for their reverse trick-or-treating event on Friday (as well as for CHOC Mission Hills patients). These 400 books along with the 200 delivered last week to CHOC’s Outpatient Infusion Center and the Oncology clinic (see included picture of post from one of our outpatient recipients) amount to 600 Halloween books delivered! We pride ourselves on providing both high-quality and high-interest age-appropriate literature so hopefully all patients from toddlers through teens and young adults will include some reading in their Halloween celebrations this year!
THANK YOU to all of our book donors who made it possible for ECBC to provide literary treats for every patient at CHOC and help kids to read, think, and THRIVE through their hospital stay. Thank you also to our $500 level BOOK IT donors who each funded approximately 50 books of this donation. All donors were recognized with their names on respective bookplates in each book. Happy Halloween! #BOOks4Treats #reversetrickortreating #braincandy #readthinkthrive #cognitivehealth #ecbc #chocchildrens
This photo popped up in my Facebook feed today — from September 1, 2015 — the first day of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month six years ago and also the day that Ethan returned to school for 3rd grade after missing all of second grade. He had just finished the hardest part of his 3.5 year battle with Leukemia. While he still had a ways to go at this point with 2.5 more years of chemo, he was kicking cancer’s butt — loving school, playing tennis and golf, and reading voraciously into so many fictional and nonfictional worlds. This photo was also just a few months before we founded Ethan & Choco’s Book Club (ECBC), where Ethan and I committed to making sure that kids undergoing treatment at CHOC, especially life-altering illness such as cancer, received the same benefits from books and reading that he did while battling Leukemia.
ECBC has come a long way since its inception — with numerous inpatient and outpatient reading programs for patients of all ages and gifting thousands of books a year. BUT we need your help in order to sustain our book gifting programs and re-launch our inpatient programs in October (we were just given the green light to bring our volunteers back to CHOC, woo hoo!). We are highly dependent on our annual fundraiser, BOOK IT, which provides the majority of the funds ECBC needs to run its programs. In the spirit of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month , please consider supporting thrivership for kid cancer warriors by donating to our online fundraiser. We are aiming to raise enough funds to get us to next September 2022, when we are hoping to host a full BOOK IT with a return of our in-person charity runs and book drive.
Become a “fundraiser”, with your own fundraiser name, monetary goal, and unique URL that can be used to send people directly to your fundraiser page. Click here to set up your fundraising page.
Donate a book directly.Click here to access the BOOK IT 2021 Amazon Wish List. All books purchased from this list will be automatically sent to Ethan & Choco’s Book Club.
Conduct your own book drive. If you wish to collect books on your own or conduct your own book drive with your family/friends/workplace for subsequent in-person donation, please email ali@ECbookclub.com We will send you a link to a separate wish list that you can share with your community and that let’s you specify the address to ship the books.
Today was book delivery day for ECBC at CHOC Outpatient Oncology — we re-stocked our library cart at the Outpatient Infusion Center, re-filled bookshelves at the Oncology Clinic, and replenished inventory of Read Think Thrive Bags for new cancer diagnoses. Cancer diagnoses are WAY up right now, especially among teens. Which I hate hearing so much. But i love that through ECBC we can help kids thrive through treatment by gifting them a mini library of wonderful new books.
Our regular book donations to ECBC have all but stopped, with nothing coming in from school book fairs or community events. To help us sustain our book gifting programs, please CLICK HERE to make a cash donation or click on these links to donate a book from our Amazon Wish Lists: Board books, Spanish books, all types of books.
