From left, volunteers Angie Ramalho, Amber Bernard and Jennifer Hooper at the Clays for Kids Fundraising Event in September 2023.Courtesy of Angie Ramalho/Supplied
The organizer: Angie Ramalho and volunteers
The pitch: Raising up to $3-million annually
The cause: Childhood Cancer Canada
Angie Ramalho will never forget the final days of her cousin Peter Carreiro’s battle with pancreatic cancer.
He was just 24 years old and within 18 months of diagnosis he looked almost unrecognizable. He’d been a strapping young man; 6 feet tall and weighing 200 pounds. But toward the end, his weight had dropped to around 70 pounds. “He was just really skin and bones,” Ms. Ramalho recalled. “l’ll never get that visual out of out of my head.”
She’d been working in the charitable sector for years and the memory of her cousin, who died in 2007, led her to focus on organizations connected to health care. A couple of years ago, she became executive director of Childhood Cancer Canada, a Toronto-based charity that provides services to kids living with cancer and their families.
While her cousin was a young adult, he was still a dependent and Ms. Ramalho could relate to the challenges many families face. “The reality is we just want to make things better for these kids and their caregivers,” she said.
She and a team of volunteers raise around $3-million annually to fund the charity’s programs, which help roughly 700 families a year. Among the services Childhood Cancer offers are financial assistance for families in need, information and tools to help children and their relatives cope with “what comes next,” and scholarships for young cancer survivors. It also funds cancer research and genetic-sequencing programs that can provide individualized treatment for patients.
“Childhood cancer is considered a rare disease, but yet it’s the most common cause of death in children in Canada. So, why aren’t we doing more to uncover the why?” she said.
Ms. Ramalho has had to help many families cope with the loss of their child, but she has also drawn strength from the many kids who have beaten the disease. “The resilience in kids is pretty remarkable,” she said. “While they’ve had to endure a lot of pain, pokes and prodding, they’ve come out of that with a different sense of almost joie de vivre.”