Larsens Pride: A Charity for Comfort and Courage
Aiming to provide “courage and comfort” for the youngest brain tumour patients, Larsen’s Pride is a charity that helps give the childhoods of cancer patients back to them.
“from life threatening brain surgery to high dose chemotherapy - there is no child friendly option.” Holly from Larsen’s Pride tells us.
This charity, established in 2019 does the utmost to assist in making the experiences of young patients under 12 as comfortable as possible.
The choice to pursue this business originated from the loss and hardship that Holly and her family went through as her son sadly lost his life to a brain tumour. “We knew what we would have wanted to take the edge off of treatment and the things that people can do to make the most of the time your child has,” Holly explains.
Larsen loved big cats and dreamed of being a zookeeper, so one of the things the charity does in remembrance of him is to donate his favourite big cat soft toys to children who are suffering a similar diagnosis.
Holly tells us that the best part of running this charity is receiving messages and photographs from the families that have received one of the donations. “However small the gesture, every moment of comfort that we can create brings us an intense sense of love and hope.”
“The charity works with very poorly children” Holly then says, “The hardest part of our work is seeing the devastation and heartbreak caused by childhood cancer and brain tumours” but these hardships are nothing compared to what the children themselves experience while suffering with these life threatening illnesses and Larsen’s Pride are extremely motivated to decrease this suffering as much as they can by spreading comfort and love.
Eco friendliness was an important aspect for the charity as “Our work brings us very close to life and death and uncertain futures,” Holly says. She explains that it would be contradictory to work in a way that creates other challenges for the future of the children that are avoidable.
Being eco friendly came naturally to Larsen’s Pride as they are based in the furthest part of West Wales with Trustees located across England and Wales. Meetings and fundraisers being held online was a step to creating a more eco-friendly charity. “It is the soft toys which requires some eco packaging.” Holly states. Due to COVID, individually wrapped toys are the hygiene standard in hospitals for immuno-compromised children. “We found Simplelifeco who were not only a local business, but a business who could help us avoid single use plastic. Win win!”
The next steps for the charity are already in motion as Larsen’s Pride are working with a variety of healthcare specialists that work with children who are treated for a brain tumour,; such as play specialists, oncologists, nurses and therapeutic radiographers. “By Christmas, we hope to have an animation produced which will support children to access radiotherapy without needing a daily general anaesthetic”. Holly explains that this can be enormously beneficial to children, enabling them to spend less time in hospital and more time at home, school and with friends and family.
Larsen's Pride, as a charity, has been built with foundations of love and loss, “and this is what drives us” says Holly. Her unique and heart-warming advice for anyone beginning their own business or company adventure is “if it is driven from the heart, you will always get from it what you need.”
