ASRL receives $300,000 grant from Genentech
The Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation has received a $300,000 grant from the Genentech Foundation to form the centerpiece of its newly launched Everyday Needs Assistance Program for families of children with cancer.
The Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation will use the funding to expand its program to assist approximately 500 single parent families of ill children this year who face the dual tragedies of their child’s diagnosis and severe financial distress.
Families who are facing the crisis of their child’s critical illness often meet with insurmountable expenses. While the child is struggling for survival, their parents must contend with the demands of hospital and daily life. They must attend to their sick child, keep their jobs and medical insurance, make mortgage or rent payments, fill the car with gas, the refrigerator with food, and their children with hope. The Everyday Needs Assistance Program addresses these urgent needs.
The Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation will work through its network of 12 pediatric hospitals nationwide to provide Everyday Needs Assistance in the form of rent and mortgage payments, utility payments, travel and grocery expenses and other vital needs that soften the overwhelming burdens of families whose children are cancer patients.
The hallmark of the Andre Sobel River Foundation is to provide assistance within 24 hours. Requests are received through the families’ social workers at their treating hospitals.
Valerie Sobel, Founder of the Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation said, “On behalf of the desperate families we serve, we are enormously grateful to the Genentech Foundation that in this year of increased financial struggles, instead of cutting our budget for family assistance, we are in fact able to increase it.”
The Genentech Foundation is a U.S.-based, private charitable foundation. It was established in 2002 by Genentech, a leading biotechnology company that discovers, develops, manufactures and commercializes biotherapeutics for significant unmet medical needs. The Foundation provides financial support to qualified nonprofit U.S.- based charitable organizations.
Genentech is committed to being a strong corporate citizen, and the Genentech Foundation is one of the most important ways in which we give back to our communities. Launched in 2002, the Foundation is charged with identifying and supporting select organizations whose missions and outreach align with our areas of focus. www.genentechfoundation.com
The Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation was founded in 2000 to provide urgent finanical assistance to single parents of catastrophically ill children. The foundation is named for 19-year-old Andre (son of founder Valerie Sobel and her late husband Erwin), who died of an inoperable brain tumor in 1995. The mission of the Foundation is: “When compassion can’t wait and single parent families are in despair, we assist with urgent expenses so that these caregivers can remain by their child’s side during catastropic illness.” Over 9,600 family members have been assisted with over $3.7 million since 2000.
For more information, visit Genentech’s website.
