How You Can Help

Happiness Is Camping, for Children with Cancer, provides a unique set of experiences for youngsters suffering from cancers, leukemia's and other catastrophic blood diseases. Our mission is to deliver the joys of a spectacular summer camp to children too sick to be out of sight of a Pediatric Oncologist, registered Oncology nurses, a first rate on-site infirmary with sophisticated chemotherapy capabilities, a state-of-the-art nearby hospital.

Staffed 24 hours a day by a pediatric oncologist and two pediatric oncology nurses from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Happiness Is Camping gives traumatized children a chance to have fun. Many of the kids who come to camp are simply too sick to have a summer experience anywhere else. Additionally, many of our kids are bald from chemotherapy, or have artificial limbs, or other physical abnormalities that would make them embarrassingly conspicuous at a "normal" summer camp. At Happiness Is Camping, everybody lets their hair down, if they have any. Our kids take off their prosthetic legs and hop into the pool. Everybody laughs. Everybody has fun. Everybody cries on the last day of camp.

Happiness Is Camping is about kids with cancer having fun at camp. A child with cancer spends an agonizing amount of time going back and forth to doctors and hospitals, getting ex-rays and cat-scans, blood tests, injections, chemotherapy, counseling, alienated. We give kids like this a chance to be "normal", to fish in a lake, swim, play basketball, attend a Friday night dance, bond with friends, laugh and sing and jump for joy. These are beautiful experience to watch, to share, and to make possible.

Please help us continue to put smiles on the faces of children tragically compromised by devastating illnesses. We have plenty of success stories to tell, plenty of kids who came to camp with two strikes against them, and recovered, went into remission, and come back as counselors. It seems that for every camper we lose, two or three have their cancers go into remission and return to camp as counselors, survivors of childhood cancers who understand, as only they can, the need to believe, endure, and love.

These are numerous ways you can help us enhance our mission, and the forms and applications below are intended to facilitate any assistance you might care to offer.

  • Apply to work at the camp as a counselor, doctor, nurse or other valued staff member.
  • Volunteer your time at the camp for a myriad of tasks.
  • Make a donation to help. You can fill out an online pledge or call us at 718-295-3100.
  • You can make a gift to honor a loved one or to commemorate a special occasion.
  • If you have goods or services to donate that you feel can be helpful please send us an e-mail. For some examples see our wish list, but don't feel limited by those needs.
  • If your company is interested in camp sponsorship, please let us know.

Happiness Is Camping is staffed largely by volunteers. Everyone from the resident medical director to the nurses to the counselors are people giving freely of their own time. We need volunteers, people who care and love enough to give their time to others.

Happiness Is Camping consumes a bewildering array of supplies, from Band-Aids to basketball nets, and we sigh with relief every year when someone saves us money with a timely donation of camping supplies. The Johnson & Johnson Corporation has given us medical supplies, the Variety Children's Foundation a van, the Bellcore Group a construction crew, the Laura Rosenberg Foundation a generous grant, a few photographers some wonderful images, a computer-savvy businessman a first-rate web-site, a couple of lawyers some excellent legal advice.

We need all the help we can get, probably we get the neediest of kids to help.