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
Please check out Ethan’s monthly Wishlist Fundraiser! This fundraiser is for the special list of books that go in ECBC’s Read Think Thrive Bags, which are the bags that we deliver to kids at CHOC just after they are diagnosed with cancer. 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_RTTbagbooks. Also, as always, we are in great need for board books and need to purchase them on a weekly basis, so we always appreciate getting these donated!
To donate a book for ECBC’s Read Think Thrive Bags, click HERE.
Please check out Ethan’s monthly Wishlist Fundraiser! One book type we currently need at CHOC is picture books for older kids and teenagers. You can listen to Ethan’s video below to learn more. To donate a book, click on the link below or go to bit.ly/wishlist_picturebooks4teens. Also, as always, we are in great need for board books and need to purchase them on a weekly basis, so we always appreciate getting these donated!
To donate a picture book for older kids and teens, click HERE.
Thank you NCL North Tustin for hosting a book drive for ECBC as part of NCL’s National Day of Service MLK Book Drive. We just received the 181 new books that the NCL North Tustin chapter collected — all terrific titles that include a range of book types to meet patients’ diverse reading interests and needs. Thank you to all of the NCL young ladies and families who contributed to this effort — we can’t wait to share these books with CHOC kiddos at our upcoming delivery next week! We especially appreciate this donation given that it is on the heels of NCL North Tustin’s Halloween book drive in October — it is rare that we get back-to-back donations so close in time from the same group! We so appreciate NCL North Tustin’s ongoing support!
ECBC just received such a wonderful donation! Loma Vista Elementary School had an entrepreneur fair, where a portion of the proceeds went to charity. LV Student Council and Entrepreneurs were given some ideas of charities to donate to, and they chose ECBC! They used the funds to purchase and donate 117 terrific new books. We are so honored when our local students get to pick a charity and choose ECBC. THANK YOU Loma Vista!
2024 was an impactful yet challenging year for ECBC. We gave away more than 6600 new books to CHOC Children’s Hospital patients across our various inpatient and outpatient book gifting programs, averaging approximately 550 books per month. And our incredible group of bedside reader volunteers delivered 500+ private read-aloud sessions at patients’ bedside — these interactive sessions target literacy skills, complex thinking, and are often kids’ only non-medical related conversations of the day. Despite strong programs and terrific hospital volunteers, fundraising took a significant hit when we were forced to cancel our in-person charity run due to significantly increased upfront costs of hosting the event. With 2023’s cushion, we raised enough to sustain our programs through the year; though our net revenue was negative, a trend our tiny nonprofit cannot afford to continue as we head into 2025. THANK YOU to everyone who supported ECBC in 2024 — every monetary donation; book donation; book drive by schools and other external groups; and social media shout-out has mattered and allowed ECBC to keep on going.
Going forward in 2025, ECBC is moving into its 10th year of book and reading programs at CHOC. This year, ECBC has the following four priorities:
TO SUSTAIN our high levels of book donations across our various book gifting programs — including our gifting libraries at CHOC’s Oncology Clinic and Outpatient Infusion Center so that every child visiting the clinic or OPI can select a high-quality book to keep; our book gifting to patients in isolation via our mobile library cart; our Read Think Thrive (RTT) Bags for patients as they are diagnosed with cancer (valued at $150/bag); and our holiday book gifting such as BOO-ks for Treats on Halloween and our December holiday book gifting. We hope to someday be able to expand beyond CHOC to provide our RTT Bags to kids at other hospitals who are diagnosed with cancer — though this is a more distant goal given the significant additional funds and storage space that would be required for more inventory. Sustaining means continued monetary and book support to continue to meet our hefty book gifting numbers of approximately 500-600 books ($5500) per month.
TO GROW our inpatient reading program to more expert reader volunteers, more days per week, more patient floors, and greater impact on kids’ thrivership during their hospital stays. We hope to move closer to our ultimate goal of offering reading to patients daily, consistent with decades of research that shows the benefits of reading aloud at least fifteen minutes per day. This goal is especially important for patients with long-term hospital stays who are often out of school and missing literature-based activities and instruction. We also plan to expand our impact by providing parents with resources to help them optimally support their kids’ cognitive health through treatment with books and reading. The hope is that this can include online methods as well as eventual in-person group sessions with parents during hospital stays.
TO OBTAIN office/storage space! We have spent the past 9+ years with a small offsite storage unit and using our founders’ house as the main source of our storage, as well the warehouse space of a friend (the hospital has very little storage space). We are in great need of a single space for book storage, book delivery and processing, and our volunteer activities (like filling the canvas bags for new diagnoses or sorting/stamping the hundreds of books that we gift each month). This is a huge and organizational-changing goal for ECBC that requires an additional $2500 per month to make happen.
TO RE-IMAGINE fundraising strategies so that we can continue the work of ECBC and afford to make the leap to securing office space. As a start, we are looking for champions of ECBC’s mission who are willing to commit to a recurring monthly donation and become an ECBC G.E.M. (Give Every Month). Our goal is to recruit 100 G.E.M.s who donate on average $75 per month — which would allow us to cover ECBC’s usual operational costs as well as $2K per month for office/storage space. We are also looking to recruit a new member to our Board of Directors who has fundraising expertise and can help strategize alternative fundraising methods.
Are you willing to become an ECBC G.E.M. and help us meet our goal? To commit to a recurring donation, please CLICK BELOW. Select your desired level of support or enter your own amount, and check the “Make this a monthly donation” box.
Click to become an ECBC G.E.M.
Thank you for helping ECBC help Orange County’s hospitalized kids to thrive with high-quality books and reading experiences! ECBC is a public-benefit non-profit corporation, EIN 83-2934289.
Ethan’s December Wishlist Fundraiser is for graphic novels. Please check out his video!
To donate graphic novels for patients at CHOC, click on the link below. If you’d like to make an ongoing monetary donation that goes towards our monthly targeted wishlist fundraisers, please consider becoming an ECBC Gem (which stands for Give Every Month). You can click on the link below to become a GEM, and select the monthly amount that you would like to give (or choose your own amount).
Thank you for helping hospitalized kids thrive with high-quality books and reading experiences! #decemberwishlistfundraiser #graphicnovels #books4CHOC #readthinkthrive #thrivagainstcancer
To donate a book to Ethan’s August Wishlist Fundraiser:CLICK HERE
If you’re looking to make an end-of-year gift to a charity before January 1, please consider supporting ECBC! We are currently gifting approximately 500-600 new books per month to patients at CHOC, and donations are greatly needed to meet this significant demand — especially since this year we couldn’t hold our in-person annual charity run and consequently raised only about half of the funds we need to cover program and operational expenses. 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. Note that there is also an option to commit to a recurring monthly donation, which is a huge blessing for our tiny nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible (ECBC Is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, EIN 83-2934289), and donors are acknowledged on the items they fund. You can click HERE to donate.
Earlier this month, we received an AWESOME donation of 324 new holiday books from OKI International’s Cypress office, who held the most amazing and thoughtfully planned book drive ever! To launch the book drive, OKI employees were invited to their conference room, where they (1) found out which Christmas book team they were on (e.g., The Polar Express, The Night Before Christmas, The Christmas Carol, etc); (2) selected paper tags with book titles and images that were hanging around the room in order to commit to purchase specific titles; (3) learned about OKI’s incentives (e.g., a luncheon for the team with the most books, raffle tickets for luncheon opportunities for every team that donates at least 40 books, additional raffle tickets for every employee who donates 3+ books with opportunities to win $100 prizes); and (4) received milk and cookies! All six teams met the 40 book goal, and as a whole, their system of printing book title tags helped to ensure the best variety across all book types. THANK YOU to OKI employees for your participation and donations, and for contributing significantly to the hundreds of books we’ve given to hospitalized kids over the last couple weeks. And a huge thank you to Kayla Dang and Beth Ferrari for all your work to organize this impressive effort! Finally, thank you Rose Vu for taking this on and getting the ball rolling!
We have found that book drives that include friendly competition tend to be the most successful — what an amazing model this provides! ECBC needs more businesses like OKI!
Earlier this week we delivered a TON (421, to be exact) of new December holiday-themed books to our gifting libraries at CHOC Children’s Outpatient Infusion Center (OPI) and CHOC’s Oncology Clinic! This means that patients who visit the oncology clinic or OPI in the days leading up to Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza can choose to pick out a holiday book (as an alternative to the usual mainstream literature) — with an array of terrific titles for patients ranging from infants/toddlers to teen and young adults. THANK YOU to all who donated and helped Orange County’s hospitalized kids to thrive through the holidays with books and reading!
ECBC’s Bedside Readers commenced our holiday read-alouds at the start of the month, and today we loaded up our inpatient gifting cart with December holiday themed books to start our gifting on the inpatient side of the hospital…which will continue for the next couple of weeks up until Christmas. We also are handing out handwritten holiday cards made by high school students from Foothill, Beckman, and El Dorado High. It is such a joy to share high-quality holiday literature with patients of all ages, and we love having a variety of options for their diversity of reading interests!
If you’d like to help provide us with holiday books, please go to our wishlist at bit.ly/decemberholidaybooks . All books will be bookplated with donor names! #holidaybooks #literaryjoy #readingthroughtheholidays #readthinkthrive #thriveagainstncancer
Ethan & Choco’s Book Club was honored to be part of Miracles for Kids’ holiday party today for CHOC patients and families living at Miracle Manor (a home subsidized by Miracles for Kids for low-income CHOC families with critically ill children). ECBC Board member and bedside reader Susie provided a holiday-themed storytime for the kids and then passed out new, age-appropriate holiday books for all patients and siblings. All books were also packaged with handwritten holiday cards from local elementary and high school students — thank you to Tustin and Placentia students for providing such thoughtful cards. We love adding books and reading to these families’ holiday festivities (and how amazing that during the festivities, Miracles for Kids volunteers are busy decorating each of the family’s apartments for Christmas!). Thank you Miracles for Kids for letting ECBC participate in this event for our 6th consecutive year, thank you Susie for representing ECBC and delivering literary joy, and thank you to those who donated holiday-themed books for the kiddos!
If you haven’t had a chance to donate a holiday book, Ethan is still running our December holiday book drive. Click HERE to donate.
THANK YOU to Baum Orthodontics in Tustin for the 117 new books! These will all be part of our delivery this Friday of approximately 500 books to CHOC’s Outpatient Infusion Center and the Oncology Clinic, where patients get to pick out a new book at every visit.
We are so grateful for our ongoing 5-years long partnership with Baum Ortho! And we so appreciate Dr. Baum’s ingenious retainer replacement program, where patients who have lost their retainer receive a greatly discounted price for their new retainer if they donate some new children’s books. We’ve now received thousands of books from Baum families….apparently kids are losing a ton of retainers!
Thank you Baum Ortho (and Baum Ortho families) for your incredible continued support!
ECBC has had so much fun over the past couple weeks celebrating Halloween with CHOC patients by sharing terrific Halloween-themed literature! This includes patients and siblings trick-or-treating for 207 Halloween books at our annual BOO-ks for Treats event; delivering 473 Halloween-themed books to our outpatient libraries at CHOC’s Outpatient Infusion Center and at the Oncology Clinic; handing out 97 Halloween books individually to patient rooms via our Mobile Book Cart; and reading a whole bunch of spooky stories at oncology, neurology, and other patients’ bedside. This amounts to a total of 777 new Halloween-themed books being gifted this Halloween season! Additionally, volunteers gave out beautiful and inspirational literary Halloween cards made by local high students (e.g., “ENWITCH your mind by READING” with an illustration of a witch reading! or CARVE some time for reading with an illustration of a carved pumpkin). Patients are so excited to celebrate Halloween, and it’s magical how powerful a wonderful Halloween book can be to inspire reading that wouldn’t otherwise happen!
A huge thank you to everyone who donated and conducted their own book drives to make this all possible: NCL North Tustin for the 183 Halloween books and 186 Halloween cards they donated (thank you Ali, Haley and Kendall Langdon for organizing the book drive); the William P. Gray Legion Lex American Inn of Court for the 83 books they donated (thank you Elia Naqvi for organizing this book drive); the many individual donors who participated in Ethan’s Halloween book drive on Amazon that resulted in hundreds more books arriving in the mail; the Foothill High Schools Ethan & Choco student club for the 64 Halloween cards they made (thank you to club President Eleanor Nguyen); El Dorado High School’s Books 4 CHOC Club for the 50 cards they made (thank you to club President Leila Do); ECBC lead volunteers Cathie James and Anne Case for helping to host our BOO-ks for Treat event; and all of our ECBC bedside readers this month for delivering such fun read-aloud in patient rooms!
This post cannot be complete without mentioning the significance of ECBC’s Halloween book sharing for our Co-Founder Ethan. Just a few days prior to Halloween in 2014, Ethan was diagnosed with Leukemia at 7.5 years old. On October 31st of that year, exactly ten years ago today, Ethan had surgery to insert a port in his chest, he received his first dose of chemo, and he dressed up with his siblings to trick-or-treat at CHOC for candy and other small toys (yet no books to be seen!). And now, 10 years later and a high-school senior, it’s remarkable to witness Ethan’s continued joy in sharing his love of reading as he hands out Halloween-themed books so that patients can also enjoy literary candy!
A huge thank you to NCL North Tustin for hosting a Halloween book drive for ECBC over the past couple of weeks. We just received their donation of 183 Halloween-themed books — a terrific collection of new, high-appeal books for CHOC patients af all ages. NCL members also made beautiful literary-themed Halloween cards, with handwritten messages, to be gifted to patients along with the books. THANK YOU to NCL North Tustin young ladies and families who contributed to this awesome bookraiser — we can’t wait to share these with CHOC kiddos at our upcoming Halloween book give-aways at CHOC! A special shout out to Ali, Haley, and Kendall Langdon for organizing the book drive and collecting + bookplating all of the books at your home! New, high-quality books are expensive — It is efforts like these that keep us going!
We still need about 100 more books for our BOO-ks for Treats Halloween book gifting at CHOC. Please donate a book if you haven’t yet! To donate, go to: bit.ly/Halloweenbooks4ECBC
A HUGE thank you to everyone who contributed to ECBC’s virtual fundraiser, BOOK IT, during the month of September. We literally can’t run our programs without our community’s support, so we appreciate every donation so very much. While our official fundraising window is closed, the donation website will remain open in the coming weeks because we only raised under half of our fundraising goal and annual expenses. We work on collecting book donations all year long; however, we need the monetary donations for a variety of expenses in order to keep our programs going (e.g., books to meet patients’ needs/interests that we don’t tend to collect via book drives; book storage; program materials other than books such as art supplies, parent pamphlets, bookmarks, reading lights, canvas bags for our book bags that are given to every child at CHOC who is diagnosed with cancer; library supplies; printing/copying; software). You can still donate to BOOK IT at runsignup.com/BOOKIT2024.
Now on to October! October is here, and so it’s time for our annual Halloween book drive! Every year, ECBC hosts BOO-ks for Treats at CHOC, where we give away hundreds of Halloween-themed books to kids who are stuck in the hospital on Halloween. BOO-ks for Treats holds a very special place in our organizations’s heart, especially ECBC Co-Founder Ethan’s, since Ethan was diagnosed with cancer just a few days before Halloween and trick-or-treated at CHOC’s Halloween event on the same day that he had surgery to insert his port and start chemotherapy. It’s hard to believe that this was TEN years ago! We founded ECBC a year later, and ever since then, we have been able to provide CHOC patients of all ages with beautiful age-appropriate Halloween books to add to their usual stash of candy and toys. In sum, we have donated hundreds of Halloween books each year and over 4000 Halloween books in total!
Please check out Ethan’s video plug to learn more and go to bit.ly/Halloweenbooks4ECBC to purchase a book off our Halloween Wish List on Amazon. All books will be sent directly to ECBC and bookplated with donor names. THANK YOU for providing literary joy to kids who are stuck in the hospital on Halloween!
With just a couple days left in September and Childhood Cancer Awareness Month (CCAM), we are making a final plea to please support BOOK IT 2024, the annual fundraiser for Ethan & Choco’s Book Club. We have always hosted our annual fundraiser during CCAM because it’s the time of year when cancer-related organizations make a dedicated effort to increase awareness and raise funds for those affected by childhood cancer. Cancer is still the #1 cause of death by disease for children in America. Among those who survive, 3 of 5 kids diagnosed with cancer face significant late-effects of treatment, including long-term neurocognitive effects, which continue to affect survivors’ quality of life for their entire life. ECBC aims to elevate kids’ academic, cognitive, and social thrivership during and long after cancer treatment through our programs that provide high-quality books and reading experiences. We very much need your help to sustain our work! We are currently only at 1/3 of our fundraising goal — which is equivalent to the amount of funds we need annually to run our programs at CHOC Children’s Hospital. If you haven’t yet supported our fundraiser, PLEASE helps us by clicking the link below and making a “multiple of 10” donation (in honor of the upcoming 10th anniversary of Ethan’s cancer diagnosis). If you can share the donation site with 10 family or friends, please do so! THANK YOU for your support — we count on our community to be able to continue to make a difference in the lives of hospitalized kids!
Today was our monthly Outpatient Gifting Library re-stocking day at CHOC Children’s Hospital’s Outpatient Infusion Center (OPI) and at the Oncology Clinic. We re-stocked our bins with 315 new books for patients of all ages, so that every time patients visit CHOC for a chemo infusion or cancer clinic check-up, they can select a book to keep. We work hard to ensure that we provide a great variety of book types so that there’s something of interest for everyone — including graphic novels for reluctant readers, informational texts for the kiddos who prefer nonfiction fact books, and a variety of poetry anthologies ranging from the silly poetry of Shel Silverstein to the more mature and emotional poems of Poet Laureate Ada Limon. While we rarely get to witness the patients on the outpatient side select their books, today we had the privilege of catching cancer warrior “B” scan the options, choose a touch-and-feel board book about sharks as well as an anthology of Avengers stories, and sit down in the OPI lobby to start “reading”. Keep reading and thriving, Superhero B!
If you haven’t yet contributed to ECBC’s annual fundraiser and would like to help us sustain our monthly outpatient gifting programs, as well as our inpatient book and reading programs at CHOC, please consider making a monetary donation at runsignup.com/BOOKIT2024. Thank you — we depend on our community to keep it all going!
Thank you Arroyo for collecting books for ECBC at your book fair this past week — we are grateful for the 87 awesome new books that you donated. And a special thank you to Claudia Rounaghi for your help organizing the book drive. We so appreciate Arroyo’s annual support since we started school book drives in 2016!
We just received a wonderful collection of 355 new books from the family and friends of Georgia Kokenge! Georgia is the mother-in-law of longtime and relentless ECBC supporter Fenny Kokenge; before Georgia passed away, she asked for a book drive for ECBC in lieu of flowers like her husband Gene had a few years prior. We created a “Georgia Kokenge Memorial Book Drive” wish list on Amazon for Fenny to share, and as in 2021, the response was magnificent! The books were sent directly to Fenny, and she had all of the titles on display at the celebration of life that she hosted at her home (all bookplated with in memory of Georgia Kokenge stickers and alongside photos of Georgia reading to her grandkids and students). Thank you to Fenny, Jason, and the Kokenge family — we are so grateful that you wanted to honor your beautiful mom in this way. We can’t wait to get these books into the hands of the kids at CHOC who are battling cancer and other life-threatening conditions!
Thank you to El Dorado High School (Placentia, CA) for your awesome donation this month of 162 new books and monetary donation of $360! And a special thank you to EDHS’s Books 4 CHOC Club led by President Leila Do for all of your hard work in leading the book drive as well as the fundraiser at Handel’s. You collected a terrific bunch of high quality books for patients of all ages, including many of our most needed book types such as board books, graphic novels, and beginning reading books. This was Books 4 CHOC’s first year in existence since they founded their club in the fall of 2023, and they have had a productive first year of making literacy support items (i.e., bookmarks, literary-themed holiday cards) as well as hosting book drives and fundraisers. THANK YOU Books 4 CHOC!
If you are a high school student and interested in starting your own high school support club for ECBC and Orange County’s hospitalized kids, please send an email to ali@ECbookclub.com. Founding and running a club can be a great way to support your local community as well as gain impactful leadership experience!
