From our very first breaths, Mikey was my teammate and taught me we’re better off working together
I guess it all starts with this picture, two babies lying together. What you can’t see is that we are lying on a small scale, born so tiny and premature that when our weights were added together, we totaled all of 7.5 pounds. From our very first breaths, Mikey was my teammate and taught me…
Research Shows Families Want Option to Donate Post-mortem Tissue
Families who lose a child to brain cancer, want doctors to give them the option to donate their child’s tissue.
Donating tissue not only contributes to research for a cure, but donating helps families grieve and see something good come from their tragic loss.
These conclusions come after surveying more than 100 families whose children died of brain cancer as detailed in an American Society of Clinical Oncology Journal of Clinical Oncology article. Gift from a Child founders Al and Patti Gustafson co-authored the article, along with clinicians and researchers from seven other institutions.
Project Accelerate
Gift from a Child partner, the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) has caught the attention of the NIH in a big way! The National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) have taken on the herculean task of sequencing the remaining tumor specimens in CBTN’s biorepository! Read…
Holidays Re-Thunk
Over the last 22 months, many people re-evaluated their work-life, how they spend their time, and how they move and live in the world. If a gift of the pandemic is people realizing the preciousness of their life and the life of those they love, we hope the next step is people realizing the preciousness…
Curefest 2021
A beautiful fall weekend in Washington DC was the perfect setting for this year’s Curefest for Childhood Cancer. Curefest is an incredible, impactful event, being one of the world’s largest gatherings of families, advocates, and researchers all looking toward a brighter future of hope and better treatment for childhood cancer. After missing the opportunity to…
Oncoheroes Biosciences And Swifty Foundation United Toward New Cures
RELEASE FROM ONCOHEROES BIOSCIENCES Childhood cancer is considered a rare disease that accounts for about 1% of all U.S cancers. However, childhood cancer is not just one disease – there are more than 12 major types of pediatric cancers and over 100 subtypes. Although pediatric cancer death rates have declined over the past four decades…
Clean Business and Green Investments
Over the last 12 weeks, we’ve explored the good and the bad in our homes, schools, and businesses, and we’ve explored actions we can take in our everyday lives to keep childhood cancer prevention on the forefront. We’re now shifting gears to look at investments in clean business practices as a way of prevention, and…
Janus and Associates
I’d like to introduce Tom Janus of Janus & Associates. Tom has been a trusted advisor and friend of our family for years and was instrumental in helping us envision our philanthropic response to Michael’s wish to do something for pediatric brain cancer research. That response being the creation of the Swifty Foundation!In the early…
Meet Lee Johnson
Meet Lee Johnson, a dear friend and mentor of Mikey’s twin, Bridget, through their work together in Herbicide Free Campus. In addition to being a loving father and great musician, Lee previously was a groundskeeper for the Benicia School District in California before a non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis led him to file a lawsuit against Monsanto,…
Access to Clean Water
Did you know that Mikey was passionate about access to fresh and clean drinking water? When Mikey, Bridget, Ian, Patti and Al visited Tanzania, they watched kids spend several hours a day walking to clean water sources and bringing it back to their villages. It disturbed Mikey that so many children were unable to attend…
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