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A Legacy of Hope, Scholarships for children who have survived cancer was started in memory of my son, Steve, who passed away from cancer in 1999 at the age of 29. Steve got cancer, Ewings Sarcoma, a bone cancer, when he was 16 and a sophomore in high school. From the time he got cancer and when it came back, there were no new treatments for his type of cancer. Steve was going to medical school when his cancer came back. It was one of his goals to help children who had gone through cancer to go to college and he asked his mother and me to use his life insurance to start a non-profit scholarship to help cancer survivors go to college. Going through cancer is a horrible experience. The average cost of health insurance for a family in Colorado is $13,000. Most good insurances will pay 80 percent of the cost of treatment. So it is easy for the out of pocket expenses for cancer treatment to exceed $20,000 in one year. Many treatments last 18 months and some treatments can be as long as three years. The result of this is that many of these families need to use not only money that was being set aside for college, but also their personal savings to pay for the cancer treatment. There are many costs that aren’t covered by insurance, such as traveling to the hospital, eating meals out, and maybe having to stay in a motel. Sometimes one of the parents may need to quit their job or cut back in the hours they work in order to help their child get through the treatment. The cost of college continues to increase. For many of our applicants our scholarship is the only chance they have at obtaining any financial aid. Education is one of the keys to improving the economy of our nation and making it stronger. Improved health care is extremely important. The young people that we help are really a direct line to solving those problems. • Our scholarships not only give them the incentive to graduate high school, but to also encourage them to go to college. • Because of their expose to good medical treatment because of their cancer most of our applicants want to become doctors, nurses, or medical researchers. • Most of the other applicants want to become teachers. The expected result of our project is that we help relieve the financial burden of these families by helping their children further their education. Our scholarship program also provides a positive mental boost to these young people, as they feel there is someone who cares about them and realizes the hardships they endured to survive cancer. Our scholarship recipients tell us that our scholarship validates what they went through. In our ten years of existence, we have given $150,000 in scholarships to 50 cancer survivors in Colorado. The main validation of our programs success is that 42 out of the 43 students who have had time to complete their degree have graduated college. We give grants ranging from $500 to a four year $10,000 scholarship. By giving these young people $500 to $2000 we play a significant roll in helping them achieve their goals and also help out their family financially. The one problem faced by our organization is getting a celebrity or public figure to back us. People will donate, volunteer, etc., if the organization has a celebrity type attached to the organization. We have tried to get someone but haven't had any success. Because of our website - http://www.stmfoundation.org, we have become a national source of information about scholarships for cancer survivors. We have received calls and emails from people in almost every state. Our email address is fmarchello@earthlink.net and our phone number is (303) 886-5018.