A New Way to Raise Awareness

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to create a post to inform you all of an idea I had in regards to raising awareness for our cause. I think it would be interesting—if I can make it work—to create a book that incorporates facts, real-life stories, and pictures to portray the life of a family who has a child with cancer, and the life of the child as well. It would inform the public of the struggles involved with being a child with cancer or the family of a child with cancer (including financial difficulties, emotional difficulties, etc) through facts; interviews with children, families, survivors, and maybe even doctors or hospital staff who have worked with these people; letters written by children with cancer; and pictures (of children, their families, the hospitals etc), among other things. We could talk about the Be a Star Foundation, our cause and event, and ways to help these families and children out as well.

Although it would be rather difficult, I think it would be amazing if I could get all the information I need and put the book together as soon as possible so that we can actually get it published! If we get it published we can speak about it at our event and even sell copies there as well. To get more people interested in the book, we can try to speak to news stations and ask them to mention it (didn’t someone say we could get the news to cover our event?) and do other things to raise publicity. I’m sure people would be interested in buying the book and I think it would be a great way to raise awareness. I’m not entirely sure how I’d write it yet. I can tell the stories as biographical accounts or include actual interviews, for example. I love to write, so maybe I can even create poems or something of the sort to include in the book as well (ones that relate to the cause, of course). I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’ll make sure to keep you all updated on things as I figure them out.

As of now, the things I’m going to start researching are: How to get a book published; Ways to publicize the book should we succeed in publishing it; Facts about cancer, children with cancer, families with cancer, etc. And I’ll also start looking into people, families, and children I can interview as well. I’ll try to do most of this myself, but I’m open to any suggestions any one has or any information they have that would help me put this together. So far, I’ve done a little bit of research on publishing and it does take some time to get it published. You’re main problem is finding someone to publish it for you, which could take time. Another alternative is self-publishing. Self-publishing would allow you to get copies of the book and have the book sold only locally, but it costs money to do that whereas the other option is free. Perhaps if we can’t find someone to actually publish it, we can have someone donate money to help us with self-publishing. Another problem I think we’ll have is the time constraints. I’d really like to make this work though, so if we can’t get it published by the event then I think that would be okay. I’ll try to get it done by then, but if not, I’ll continue my work with it and get it published later on down the road and we’ll do what we can to let the community know about it.

I’ll also try sending an email out to Julie Healey or Vanessa Simmons to ask them if they have any suggestions for making this work or resources to help us do so. I’d also love to hear what their thoughts on the idea are. I’ll probably send them a link to this blog. So, this is about the extent of my thoughts on this so far—it’s only a newly formed idea, after all—but I think it has a lot of potential. What do you guys think?

— Chelsea

P.s. I'm also going to be working on writing letters to people of importance (famous people, for example) to see if we can get them to donate items such as a signed CD among other things. If anyone has suggestions on who to write letters to and what to ask for it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!