Ten highlights for ten years: Our 30th birthday celebration
2025-04-11
In Owen's second highlight over his ten-year tenure at The Kids' Cancer Project, we look back on our 30th birthday celebration.
2023 marked The Kids’ Cancer Project’s 30th anniversary. Founded by one man in 1993, it is a charity-wide mantra that one person can make a difference. Over the three decades, the committed support of wonderful people like you have helped us achieve wonderful things and make incredible strides forward in childhood cancer treatments and survival rates.
The 2023 celebrations served as a time to pause and celebrate the fact that more kids are surviving cancer than ever before. However, with more work to do and more breakthroughs to be made, focused quickly turned back towards working together and funding vital research in a bid to realise our dream of no child dying from cancer.
The Kids’ Cancer Project’s 30th anniversary was celebrated with our board, staff, researchers, families and supporters of the charity. The focus was to acknowledge 30 incredible years for our partners, families, fundraisers and advocates whose dedication has helped transform the lives of children with cancer.
We celebrated with Merveen & Robert Sjollema, whose daughter Alice stole Col’s heart and drove him to make a difference. Alice was a small child from a rural town, who stayed at Ronald McDonald House. In spite of her terminal disease, Alice was always smiling, her spirit unshakeable. Alice passed away in 1993, just shy of her seventh birthday. Her funeral broke Col's heart and became the catalyst for his fundraising efforts in childhood cancer research, even inspiring the name of one of our original bears, the Alice Bear.
.png)
.png)
Col and Alex Willows’ journey was revisited as part of the celebration, 23 years on from their first interaction. Alex and Col met when the former was receiving cancer treatment at a time when survival rates for his cancer sat at 56%, with devastating side effects often following for those who entered survivorship. Fast forward to today and Dr Alex Willow is a proud father himself and a wonderful ambassador of The Kids’ Cancer Project. Click here to listen to Alex articulately explaining the work of the charity.
Dr Marion Mateos has a storied history with The Kids’ Cancer Project, with many of her milestones also celebrated in 2023. Marion was supported by The Kids’ Cancer Project in 2014 with three years of funding for a young PhD student who spent that time upskilling in statistics and applied genomics through her PhD. A decade later Marion is a Col Reynolds Fellow, provided with three years' worth of funding to pursue better outcomes for kids with cancer.
As mentioned in my last highlight, our celebrations culminated in a $7.6 million commitment to the Col Reynolds Fellowship Program to support groundbreaking childhood cancer research. Named in Honor of Col Reynolds OAM, founder of The Kids’ Cancer Project the investment aimed to future-proof childhood cancer research by attracting and retaining talented researchers, encouraging new researchers and providing career advancement opportunities for existing ones.
Two years on and we’re working as hard as ever to make our next milestone even bigger. My next highlight is coming in a few days!
Help me in my quest to raise $100,000. That's $10 for each the 10,000 kids that have been diagnosed with cancer over my 10-year tenure.