BHS YIP club brings comfort and care to kids fighting cancer
Bloomsburg High School’s Youth in Philanthropy members stand beside the hundreds of snack items they collected for Kelsey’s Dream, a nonprofit serving children undergoing cancer treatment.
YIP, a program of the Community Giving Foundation, provides students with the opportunity to study community needs, review grant applications, and award funding to local organizations each spring. But at Bloomsburg, the club doesn’t stop at writing checks. Students look for meaningful ways to serve personally, a mindset that began in their very first year.
One of the early grant applications came from Kelsey’s Dream, created in memory of 12-year-old Kelsey Kuhns, who lost her battle with cancer in 2007. Her parents, Tina and Justin, founded the organization to bring comfort to children facing extended hospital stays, treatments, and anxiety-filled waiting rooms. Their programs now include stuffed toy “Hopper” bags, snack packs for hospitals, transportation assistance for families, and handmade fleece blankets for children attending summer cancer camp.
Even though the original grant request did not fully align with YIP’s funding priorities that first year, the application included a sentence that changed everything: students were invited to help make blankets for campers. Instead of turning the request away, the club adopted the idea and built a tradition.
Each year since, the YIP students have raised money and crafted 20–25 fleece tie blankets, all of which are gifted to campers who take them home as a reminder of the support and comfort they received. That project later grew into a schoolwide snack drive supporting Kelsey’s Dream’s hospital program. With help from teachers who offer extra credit for donations, the club has now filled founder Tina Kuhns’s SUV for two consecutive years, saving the nonprofit more than $400 annually in food costs.
“Our students don’t just write checks,” their adviser Dyan Murphy shared. “They ask, ‘What else can we do?’ And then they do it.”
That same spirit has guided the group in other projects as well. When students learned that some Bloomsburg elementary children lacked proper winter clothing, they didn’t wait for a grant cycle — they organized a drive and created a permanent clothing closet. They volunteer monthly at the local food bank filling “Panther Packs” for students in need. This year, they held a bake sale to support the family of Aiden Ha, whose passing had deeply affected the school community.
But even with all those commitments, the partnership with Kelsey’s Dream remains the club’s most consistent and heartfelt project, one that blends philanthropy, creativity, and empathy in a way students say feels real.
As Murphy put it, “They’ve learned that philanthropy isn’t just money. It’s time, effort and choosing to show up for people you may never meet.”
At Bloomsburg, that lesson is no longer theoretical. It’s tied, knotted, delivered and received: one blanket, one snack, one act of kindness at a time.