Over the past few weeks, photographs and the stories of dozens of families and pediatric patients at New York-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have been published on the Humans of New York blog and social media accounts. In addition to documenting the physical and emotional war stories of these patients — and their caregivers — HONY has been fundraising to support the team at MSK who have committed their careers to saving lives.
In less than three weeks, the project has raised more than $3.8 million from over 103,200 people through a crowdsourcing site, according to Today.
About two-thirds of the money will be allocated to funding research initiatives, while the remainder will be sued to supplement family support programs, Nina Pickett, MSK's Department of Pediatrics administrator, told Today.
Ms. Pickett worked closely with HONY founder and photographer Brandon Stanton to find the families to interview after Mr. Stanton first reached out to the hospital about his idea for the project.
"It was extraordinarily serendipitous," Ms. Pickett told Today. "He had no touch with the pediatric cancer community, no knowledge of anyone affiliated, but he just had in his heart that there was so much injustice around the idea that a child would get cancer and he decided to do a series on it."