Starlight™ Children's Foundation Mission Statement: We help seriously ill children and their families cope with their pain, fear and isolation through entertainment, education and family activities.

What Starlight Does: When a child or teenager has a serious medical condition, everyone in the family is affected. The kids, their parents and siblings struggle, in different ways, to grapple with the intrusion of illness or serious injury into their lives. Starlight™ understands what families go through when a child is sick, and how important it is for families to find relief from constant worry and isolation. Our entertainment, education and family activity programs have been proven to distract children from their pain, help them better understand and manage their illnesses, and connect families facing similar challenges so that no one feels alone.

Starlight™ serves children fighting life threatening and chronic illnesses such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, HIV/AIDS, and kidney disease so that they can forget for a few moments about being sick and do what they do best - just be kids. Touching the lives of more than 180,000 children each month, Starlight™ uniquely offers a comprehensive menu of both "high tech" and "high touch" programs. Our array of outpatient, hospital-based and Web offerings enables us to provide ongoing support for children and families - before, during and after medical treatment. Research conducted on select Starlight programs indicates patient benefits include reduced pain, greater compliance with treatment, and an increased sense of peer support, knowledge, responsibility for disease management, and ability to cope. The way we see it, while doctors work to restore a child's health, Starlight works to restore his or her spirit.

Help us brighten their world, a little each day.