La Jolla foundation and legacy honored for work On Oct. 19, the highly popular Southern California support group for teens with cancer and their siblings called Some Of My Best Friends Are Bald (SOMBFAB) awarded La Jolla-based The Seany Foundation the Guardian Angel Award for its efforts to improve the lives of kids with cancer. Some of the initiatives recognized during the award ceremony included construction of “The Seany Room” — an activity room for teens with cancer at Rady Children’s Hospital — and Seany’s Sponsor-a-Kid program. The program allows participants to sponsor movie tickets so young cancer patients and their families can enjoy free admission and snacks to a prescreening of a blockbuster movie at one of Seany’s Movie Nights. Sean Lewis Robins founded The Seany Foundation in 2005 as he fought his own battle with Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, for nearly seven years until his death in 2006 at the age of 22. The Seany Foundation is Sean’s legacy, and continues to work to improve the lives of children, teens and young adults battling cancer. For more information, visit www.theseanyfoundation.org. Calling on teenage movers and shakers The Jewish Community Federation and Helen Diller Family Foundation is seeking nominees for the 2012 Diller Tikkun Olam Award — a prestigious honor and $36,000 prize for teens who have demonstrated leadership and commitment to making the world a better place through community service and social action projects. Teens may nominate themselves or they can be nominated by teachers, community leaders, rabbis or anyone associated with the teen — aside from family members — who know the value of the teen’s volunteer service and commitment. Five recipients will be granted $36,000 for the award — named “tikkun olam” after the Hebrew phrase meaning “repair the world” — that the teen can use to support education expenses, further community or social projects, or otherwise support the recipient’s vision for making the world a better place. This year, La Jollan Liza Gurtin, 17, was awarded with the 2011 Tikkun Olam Award for her dedication to helping those in underprivileged countries gain access to clean drinking water through a fundraising initiative called “Walk for Water” — a five-kilometer walk where participants carry buckets of water to simulate conditions in impoverished villages around the world to raise funds and awareness for the cause. Candidates must be California residents, between the ages of 13 and 19 years old at the time of nomination and must self-identify as Jewish. Teens who were remunerated for their services are ineligible. To nominate a teen, visit www.jewishfed.org/teenawards/process or call (415) 512-6437 for more information.
