To support youth and young adults through cancer treatment and life afterwards, offering practical help and community as they navigate everyday life, including disabilities and lasting health effects caused by cancer or its treatment.
Practical Support
Community
A future where every young person affected by cancer has the support to live a meaningful life, with possibilities that are not defined by the effects of cancer or its treatment.
Our programs are shaped with young people who have been through cancer. What we offer is guided by their experience rather than assumptions about it.
We help with real decisions and tasks: returning to school or work, changing direction when that’s needed, asking for accommodations, understanding what benefits might be available, and building everyday, communication and workplace skills.
No one should be the only person their age in the room. We create spaces where young people can meet others who understand what they’ve been through.
We keep track of what our programs achieve and share what we learn, including the parts that need improving.
I was diagnosed with advanced nasopharyngeal cancer at 16, and again at 28. Cancer interrupted my education and career plans, and treatment left lasting changes to my speech and swallowing, along with other health challenges I continue to manage.
Returning to school and planning my future brought questions I hadn’t expected. How do you explain a long gap on a resume? What do you do when your health changes the work you can do? I worked through much of this on my own, while still managing my health. I found ways to move forward, but finding the support I needed was a challenge in itself.
That’s why I started Rise Above Cancer Foundation. I wanted young people facing cancer to have somewhere to turn for practical help and people who understand. That support matters during treatment, and it matters just as much when you’re ready to go back to school, look for work, or plan what’s next.
I am still navigating life after cancer myself. Through Rise Above Cancer, I want other young people to feel supported as they build lives that matter to them, even when those lives look different from what they had imagined. No one should have to figure out what comes next alone.
Youth and young adults aged 15 to 34 affected by any cancer, during treatment and afterwards. Our programs are open to everyone in this group, and we make a deliberate effort to reach racialized and newcomer communities and people living on low incomes, who often face added barriers to support.
We’re based in Hamilton and serve the stretch from Niagara through to the Greater Toronto
Area, including Burlington and the communities in between. Some of our programs run virtually and are open to young people anywhere in Canada, so distance, fatigue or a treatment schedule doesn’t have to keep anyone out. We expect to grow into more communities as we’re able to.
