On Saturday, June 27, the Laufer family set up Team Laufer’s Lemonade Stand outside their Alameda home to raise funds for Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation [1] (ALSF) in honor of 5-year-old Charlie Laufer, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in June 2024. Their fundraising page shows that the stand and online donations have now surpassed the family’s $3,600 goal. The family hopes to make this important lemonade stand an annual tradition.
[2]Team Laufer’s stand was part of ALSF’s annual Lemonade Days campaign, a nationwide effort to raise funds for childhood cancer research and support for families affected by pediatric cancer. When Alex Scott was only 4 years old, she started hosting lemonade stands to raise money to give back to the doctors at her children’s hospital to find more cures for childhood cancer. Alex’s mother Liz Scott built Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation in the decades after Alex passed away from neuroblastoma at 8 years old. The foundation has become the largest independent charity dedicated to childhood cancer research and family support in the United States.
Charlie, along with her parents and her two siblings, hosted the Laufer family’s joyful afternoon fundraiser. Family, friends, neighbors, Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft, and members of the Alameda Police Department stopped by to show their support. Neighbors could pick up lemonade as well as yummy lemon-themed treats after making their donations. Charlie and her sisters, dressed in lemon dresses and lemon hats, helped run the stand by pouring lemonade and counting cups of lemonade sold. One of the sisters even made cute friendship bracelets to share.
[3]As Charlie’s mother, Molly Laufer, says, ALSF was extremely supportive while Charlie was undergoing cancer treatment. Charlie was diagnosed with thyroid cancer when she was 3 years old.
“I will never forget hearing the words ‘metastatic carcinoma’ on a phone call with a doctor I hadn’t even met yet,” Laufer wrote in a reflection shared with family and friends.The diagnosis began a difficult two-year period of surgery, treatment, travel, and follow-up care.
Laufer said she first encountered ALSF through a network of other supportive parents whose children had cancer. The foundation’s work is personally meaningful to her because Charlie’s treatment was directly shaped by research supported by ALSF. Charlie received a targeted therapy that helped treat metastatic tumors in Charlie’s lungs and reduced the amount of radioactive iodine she needed.
“When we learned that this targeted therapy was funded by ALSF… we knew that this was a Foundation that would be part of our story forever,” Laufer wrote. The Laufer family traveled from California to Philadelphia for Charlie’s care, including treatment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The money raised by Team Laufer’s stand will specifically benefit ALSF’s Travel for Care program, which helps families who need to travel as the Laufer family did to reach specialized cancer treatment.
The stand continued a connection between Charlie and the Alameda Police Department. Last year, after a package containing a custom Wonder Woman-themed shirt for Charlie was stolen from the family’s home before a treatment trip, Alameda police officers and community members helped replace the shirt and brought gifts for Charlie. Officers again came by the lemonade stand to support.
[4]For the Laufer family, the stand represents giving back. Laufer said Charlie, now 5½, is beginning to understand more about what she has experienced over the past two years. “No matter the problem, be part of the solution” is a family motto, Laufer said. She added that the family hopes Charlie will feel a deepening connection to Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation as she grows up, and that their experience can help them “continue to pay it forward for the families that come after us.”
Team Laufer’s Lemonade Stand was a wonderful neighborhood celebration of Charlie’s progress and the support systems that help children and families through cancer treatment. As Laufer points out, in the current political climate, cancer research has been significantly impacted with federal funding cuts to NIH and NCI, so medical research institutions are even more beholden to private fundraising to support their work.
Vivian Delchamps Wolf (English PhD, UCLA, 2022) is a professor of English at Dominican University of California and a contributing writer for the Alameda Post. She is also a disability justice advocate, ballroom dancer, cat lover, and board game enthusiast. Contact her via [email protected] [5]. Her writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Vivan-Delchamps-Wolf [6].