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
Thank you to Elise Joseph and her friends for dedicating your last book club meeting to being Thrive Buddies for kids at CHOC who are recently diagnosed with cancer. Each of your book-inspired artwork and Thrive Buddy postcard will go in a Read Think Thrive Bag to inspire new oncology warriors to read and respond creatively to a fun book — which helps contribute to cognitive health and thrivership through treatment! THANK YOU GIRLS, and thank you for each donating a copy of the book! If others would like to involve their youth groups (i.e., classrooms, book clubs, Girl Scouts) in this activity, please e-mail at Ali@ECbookclub.com and we will provide instruction/materials.
A HUGE thank you to Rossmoor Elementary School for donating 531 NEW BOOKS to Ethan & Choco’s Book Club! This terrific school has a Harry Potter style house system for Knights — where the four Knight houses are engaged in friendly competition in academic and non-academic areas throughout the year, including philanthropic support of the community. What a wonderful way to create school community and motivate students! ECBC was so fortunate to be the recipient of their most recent community outreach project, where donation boxes were put out at the school for each of the Knight houses, and students purchased books to contribute by either ordering off an ECBC-provided Amazon wish list or buying books at their school book fair. We are blown away by the response, which amounts to the largest single book donation from a school that we have received and will provide 2-3 months of books for our inpatient and outpatient programs at CHOC Children’s Hospital. Congrats to House of Lancelot for contributing the most books at more than 200 new books donated!
THANK YOU Rossmoor families for rallying behind our cause. Thank you also to Kristin Moushon for thinking of ECBC and connecting us with your school. And, a special thank you to Rossmoor Principal Amy Coltey for your commitment to making community outreach part of your school’s culture and for all you did to make this book drive a great success! Go Knights!
THANK YOU Guin Foss Elementary for donating to ECBC last week at your book fair. We appreciate your support so much, and we can’t wait to get all these great books to patients at CHOC Children’s Hospital! A special shout out to Susie Alexander for your help organizing the book drive!
THANK YOU so much to Arroyo Elementary School for hosting a book drive for ECBC alongside your school book fair last week. And thank you to the Arroyo families who donated many awesome books!! all books will go directly to patients at CHOC Children’s Hospital who are battling cancer and other life-altering illnesses. A special shout out to Danielle Burton for coordinating the book drive!
A huge THANK YOU to Fairmont Private School North Tustin Campus for your donation of 139 books—all great, high-demand titles! A great success for a small school of only 300 students! And thank you Tina Jussal for coordinating the book drive! We are so grateful for your support! And even more grateful to learn that Fairmont wants to support us every year! (We need more Thrive Partner schools who support us annually). #schoolbookdrive #thrivepartnerschool #kidshelpingkids #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 HUGE thank you to Grace Lutheran School for their donation of 200 new, fantastic books of all types, ranging from board books to picture books and chapter books to informational texts, graphic novels and teen literature. ECBC is especially grateful for the hard work of these 6th grade boys, who organized and conducted the school-wide book drive as their spring service project. The boys made flyers to distribute to school families, created their own video/commercial to share with all of the classes, made book collection boxes, ran book collection tables for the 12 day that they held the book drive. This is the first (and only) book donation that we received from a school during the 2020-2021 school year, so we are deeply appreciative. Thank you Grace Lutheran and especially this crew of terrific boys!.
ECBC Co-Founders Ethan and his mom Ali spent the day at the Orange County Children’s Book Festival working hard to raise awareness and collect a few book donations too. It’s hard to believe this is ECBC’s 4th year at the OC Children’s Book Festival!
This week, Girl Scout Troop 3244 hosted an AWESOME support event to raise awareness and funds/supplies for ECBC’s Read+Think+Thrive Box program for kids who are diagnosed with cancer. This event, which the troop fully funded and organized, included:
A new book drive, with a children’s book off our book box wish list as the admission ticket
Stations to create items for our book boxes, such as bookmark decorating and box decorating
Stations that celebrate books and reading, including storytime, book inspired food crafting and treat, and a game station.
Guest speaker Ethan who was invited to share his story of founding ECBC
An ECBC patch for all Girl and Boy Scouts who attend
The girls also did a tremendous amount of preparation for their event, including formulating plans for the event and the activities at each station, making a book donation box, designing a flyer for advertising, making samples and signs decor for each station, distributing flyers to their community, designing and official patch for the event, various pre-event meetings to assign roles and cover all necessary. A tremendous group effort indeed!
The troop’s event resulted in the following donations:
115+ new books from ECBC’s wish lists for our book boxes
$110 in donations for art supplies for the book boxes
21 awesomely decorated book boxes
35 laminated youth-made reading themed bookmarks
A girl scout/boy scout patch design for future scout events supporting ECBC, plus a donation of 50 patches to ECBC
What an absolutely terrific model this troop created for other girl scouts or philanthropic groups to use to support our book box program! THANK YOU to this terrific troop, and their amazing leader Jill Pang, for your hard work on this the las few months and for choosing ECBC for your Bronze Award project! We so appreciate you, and especially your creativity and inititiative in designing a new way to support our program — which helps our infant charity grow as an organization!
If your group is interested in hosting their own Book Drive & Thrive Party to support our Read+Think+Thrive Box program, please contact us at Ali@ECbookclub.com.
ECBC is so grateful for having received 22 new terrific books for teens for our gifting library program at CHOC from the Foothill Ehan & Choco Club! More importantly, thank you Taylor Kubaska and Aya McNamee for starting the club this year — this was our first high school club! Hopefully after you graduate, others will follow in your steps as co-presidents, as it is really awesome to receive support at the high school level and to receive book donations that target teens!
If there are other teens out there who are interested in supporting reading for hospitalized kids/teens and starting an Ethan & Choco’s Club at their high school, please email ECBC at Ali@ECbookclub.com.
Thank you Foothill Ethan & Choco Club for your awesome donation, and a huge thank you to Riley and Aya for taking the initiative to found this club!
