About HCS

What We Do:
Harvard Cancer Society offers six different volunteer programs and hosts events for the Harvard community throughout the year. Please visit these sections of our website to find out more about these opportunities and to find out how to get involved.

History:
Harvard Cancer Society had its beginnings in a dedicated group of Class of 1997 Cabot House friends. Members of this Cabot rooming group began volunteering at the Ronald McDonald House in Brookline, Massachusetts as volunteer weekend managers. The Ronald McDonald House program provides comfortable, temporary housing near medical facilities for the families of children with serious illnesses, who must travel great distances to receive proper care. These Cabot House volunteers helped around the House to ensure that it was comfortable and welcoming for families whose children were undergoing treatment for various childhood cancers (chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow transplants, etc). They played with the children who stayed there, made dinners with the families, and decorated for Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and other special occasions. According to Yen-Lin Chen, one of the founders of HCS and its first president, "We loved volunteering there so much that we wanted to make sure the volunteering continued when we graduated."

And indeed it has. This Ronald McDonald House experience, in combination with a series of other events, together provided the inspiration and grounding that fostered Harvard Cancer Society's founding in 1995.

At the time she began volunteering for the Ronald McDonald House, Chen had also been a long-time volunteer in the Brigham and Women's Chemo Clinic, where she would spend one afternoon a week talking to the patients who were there for hours receiving chemotherapy infusion. She met so many inspiring patients there, from a grandfather with pancreatic cancer to a young woman with breast cancer. One young woman whom Chen grew to know quite well was a budding artist, and only 25 years old at that time. One day, this patient showed Chen photographs and paintings relating her experience undergoing a mastectomy and confronting cancer at a very young age. Inspired by her story, Chen wanted to invite this brave young artist to display her work at Radcliffe. She thought that this exhibit would also be a great forum for launching the distribution of a series of educational flyers about smoke cessation, PAP smears, breast self exams, testicular exams, and colon cancer screening, to increase awareness around campus.

The summer of this same year, Chen visited a marrow donor registry drive in Boston being held for a young Asian-American leukemia patient who was looking for a marrow donor. The organizer of the drive relayed to Chen the difficulty of finding matching donors for minority patients because minority donors are greatly underrepresented in the registry. It struck Chen that Harvard, as a very diverse campus, and Cambridge, as a very diverse community, would be great places for seeking more donors to the National Marrow Donor Registry. She contacted the National Registry and secured funding from the Harvard Foundation to hold a Marrow Donor Registry at Harvard, with a goal of recruiting more potential donors.

"So these three aspects coalesced in the fall of 1995 into a momentum for formalizing the organization so we could hold the art exhibit by that young artist, organize marrow donor registry drives, recruit more volunteers to the Ronald McDonald House and oncology clinics, and do campus outreach," says Chen.

Chen and her Cabot House rooming group friends were the founders of the Harvard Cancer Society and its first members, who elected Chen as the first president of the society in 1995. And so the Harvard Cancer Society was officially launched. The mission of the organization in its early years was three-fold: (1) volunteering; (2) education; and (3) community building, goals that are still today at the forefront of Harvard Cancer Society's efforts.

Years after Chen and her peers have graduated, the Harvard Cancer Society has continued to grow, expanding its program offerings, events, and volunteer base, and strengthening its impact on Harvard and its surrounding communities in profound ways. With a dedicated, creative, and enthusiastic group of volunteers, Harvard Cancer Society continues to strive to achieve the founders' mission for the organization and to work together for a cancer-free future.