Meagan Lockhart 
I’m excited to hear more. Welcome Savina.

Savina Chacheva 
Thank you so much for the warm welcome Meagan and Colontown for having us today. I’m excited to meet everyone here and share more about the center and the services that we have available. As Meagan mentioned, we are located in Illinois, however, and largely because of the pandemic, we were able to expand and reach more people through our virtual offerings on Zoom.

Savina Chacheva 
So I will share my screen and just kind of give you a little bit of an overview regarding the Cancer Wellness Center. The Cancer Wellness Center was founded in 1989. We were a small organization initially focused on doing a hotline and a couple of different support groups and wellness offerings. Since, in the last 34 years, we’ve grown significantly and offer now a wide variety of services, which I will get into further in my presentation, but we serve about 1,400 people each year. And that includes both those diagnosed with cancer, their loved ones, and then anyone who’s lost somebody to cancer as well. Everything that we do and that I will talk about is free of charge. And we make that happen because of the generosity that we have of individual donors, corporations, foundations who support the work that we do at the center.

Savina Chacheva 
So who we serve, as I mentioned, we do not provide services just for the cancer patient. We serve anyone impacted. So that means those that are diagnosed, and that is at any point in diagnosis, whether they’re newly diagnosed, in treatment, with a recurrence, or if they have completed treatment. We provide services to both adults and children. So we do have a child life specialist on staff, and a child psychologists on staff who can work with kids who either have a cancer diagnosis, or have a parent or a loved one with a cancer diagnosis as well. And then as I did mention, unfortunately, there is grief in the cancer experience. We do provide support for those grieving the loss of a loved one. The majority of our staff speaks English, we do have two Spanish speaking therapists as well, and have just recently added Romanian and Russian to our list as well. As I mentioned, we have a wide range of services that we do at the center. My focus as the Program Director is the nonclinical services. So I focus really on the education and wellness at the center. For education programs, those are ones that you can easily access from anywhere, a lot of them right now are virtually offered through Zoom. We do have a program tonight on cancer and pain and managing pain. So if you’re interested, I’ll put that in the chat here. The mental health piece that Meagan invited us for and kind of what we do and where most people come to us because of is the counseling and support groups. As I mentioned, there is a wide range in who we serve, and how we support the families. In addition to doing counseling, we have support groups. And those are divided by men’s, women’s, we have co-ed, young women’s, we’re recruiting for a young men’s group, young adults, which is also a co-ed so anybody between the ages of 20 to 40. There’s not a strict cut off, it depends on kind of where they are in their life stages, significant others so for those who are caring for a loved one, we do have a pediatric group as well and then parenting with cancer. A lot of the groups that we bring to the center are based on demand. So if we do find that there is a need for any other groups, we will add as needed. So if there’s something you don’t see on here that you’re like, you know, I’m curious Savina if you guys are offering something on young adults who are caregivers, we’ve done that. We don’t at the moment, but feel free to reach out to us and we can always put you on a waiting list as we’re growing groups too. And then as I mentioned, part of my job is the wellness services at the center too which includes stress reduction, yoga, exercise, weight loss, mindfulness. I kind of lump in nutrition in there too. And then we do have a wig salon at the center. That is only in here in Northbrook in Illinois, for people that have lost their hair due to treatment. As I mentioned, the wellness and education can be accessed virtually. We do have many of them also recorded and can be viewed afterwards on YouTube. So if there’s a topic that you’re interested in, I’ll share our YouTube channel with Meagan who can provide it as a resource after if there’s a topic you’re interested in that maybe you missed. We do record and publish many, many of them. The counseling and the support groups we’ve expanded. We do have some therapists that can provide services in different states.

Savina Chacheva 
I kind of have the full list on here for you. That is limited as most of our staff is Illinois based but we do have that offering right now. And so how do we make all that happen? It’s our community. We have many volunteers who deliver classes, lectures, and support the center in that way too, and they give up their time. We train graduate students in counseling. So our clinical work is professional, trained therapists. And then we do provide additional training for students so that we could really grow that niche population in doing counseling for the cancer community. We fundraise in order to, as I said, support our programs. So in addition to having individuals who donate to us, corporations, and grants, we do have fundraising events throughout the year. We have four major ones. We have actually our big annual benefit coming up in two weeks. We also are supported by our Board of Directors and our Associate Board.

Savina Chacheva 
I just wanted to share with you, this is feedback that we get from our clinical services. So from that mental health perspective that we do. A lot of people who utilize our services find a lot of benefit in reducing their stress, managing and understanding their cancer experience, increase their social support, improve communication with their support system, so whether that’s with their caregivers, or even their healthcare providers, we empower people to seek that support for themselves and ask questions and have that guidance from us.

Savina Chacheva 
And how do you get connected? I have a QR code here that links to our website. I’ll also put the website in the chat. And then I have a picture here of our Intake Coordinator, Alana Lebovitz. Alana works Monday through Friday, and she usually gets back to people within a business day to do a short intake and then refer them to programs and services. Thank you so much. As everybody, I answer questions at the end. Thank you.