Our Mission

Alli’s Journey is a charitable organization that focuses on raising funds for adolescents and young adults, ages 13-35, with cancer.

For several years a vital part of our mission is to provide Comfort Bags to meet the need of the Adolescent and Young Adult program (AYA) at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center. When a young adult receives a cancer diagnosis, it’s a shock. And often, they enter treatment with nothing. Comfort Bags are designed in consultation with oncological experts to provide these young adults with items to make their treatment that much less of a burden.

Today our Comfort Bag program meets even more needs with the recent additions of Sunnybrook Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, and Southlake Regional Health Centre.

We have also recently established a new partnership with the AYA at PMH to fund a new initiative - Mindfulness Based Art Therapy.  Mindfulness based art therapy combines mindfulness practices and the creative process in a group session with the support of a certified art therapist.  The program aspires to facilitate emotional healing and wellness informed by humanistic principals of empathy, compassion and unconditional positive regard.

Participants build upon existing tools in order to promote well-being and self-reliance to encourage creative exploration and expression of the inner dialogue that inspires new and hopeful perspectives. Sessions though in a group format are person- centered and individualized to meet the unique needs of each client.

Your contribution will be used to support either, or both of, these important initiatives - Comfort Bags and the Mindfulness Art Therapy Program. 

Alli’s Journey supporters have grown and we are committed to supporting the young adult cancer community in any way we can. 

About ALLI'S JOURNEY

Courage, strength and heart: three traits that every young adult battling cancer exhibits. Alli Shapiro-Amar, founder of Alli’s Journey, exhibited just that in her seven-year fight with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma — courage, strength — and heart, to live with this disease using humour, humility and belief as her strongest weapons. Tragically, Alli succumbed to her disease at the age of 26, with the same courage, strength and heart — but most of all with dignity — in July 2006. Alli’s Journey focuses on the segment of the younger population that is struggling with cancer in various forms and degrees of substance.