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Community Corner

Helping Kids with Cancer Feel Like Kids Again

Thomas Haveron's non-profit foundation addresses educational needs and works to make dreams come true for children with cancer.

Last summer, while at a game in the coveted Legends section of Yankee Stadium, Thomas Haveron experienced an epiphany.

"There was a young kid and his pop sitting in front of me. And the boy had no hair, no eyebrows. And I knew what he was kind of going through, though I didn't know exactly what his diagnosis was," Haveron recalls. "And I said, 'Hey, would you like me to get you a baseball?' And he turned to me and said, 'They tend to throw them to me—would you like me to get you one?' When he said that to me, it shook me up. He just slapped me in the face with reality."

Haveron, a Warren resident and chiropractor with offices in Harrison and Elizabeth, had just recently founded Medicine via Philanthropy (MVP) to raise money to provide a college education each year to one student with top-notch grades who otherwise would have been financially unable to go.

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Then he met Tristin Greer at Yankee Stadium and decided to expand his fledgling non-profit foundation to include providing hope to kids who are battling cancer. At the time, Greer, then 14, was traveling every other week from his home in Chattanooga, Tenn., to New York for treatment of stage IV neuroblastoma.

"My foundation is all about the mental aspect [of the disease. Children with cancer] get treated all day long with chemo, poked and prodded and scanned," Haveron says. "And I think the mental aspect and staying positive is just as important. So we focus on that."

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Whether sending a child to a favorite Broadway play, arranging a meeting with an All-Star pitcher or buying equipment for baseball fields recently dedicated to the memory of a boy who had passed away, Haveron uses the connections he has made through his practice to sports players and others to make dreams come true.

"If you ask me, everything happens for a reason. I think God puts people in my path," he says. "He put Tristin in my path."

Haveron, a Newark native who is married and has an elementary-age son, lost both his parents to cancer at a young age.  

"My aunt and my uncle legally went through the process of adopting me and my sister. But my great-aunts and uncles and my grandparents and the Felician nuns all took a hand in raising us.  So it was a community thing," says Haveron.  "I think it has everything to do with the person that I am.  I would love to have known my mom and my dad but I wouldn't change my life for anything because I've been blessed a million times over."

Haveron says Medicine via Philanthropy has already received financial commitments for this year well beyond last year's budget of more than $100,000, which he'll continue to use to provide an education to students in need while helping kids with cancer be kids again.

"We came to a fork in the road and I thought, 'Do I go left or do I go right?' And I said, 'You know what? I'm going to tear myself in half and go both ways,'" he says, about his foundation's dual role. "Helping a kid get an education is important because that may be the person who will save countless number of lives and, even more importantly, who may find a cure for neuroblastoma."

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