Ask 16-year-old Lantana teen Sadie Keller how many toys she plans to collect, sort, and deliver this holiday season to North Texas children battling childhood cancer, and she’ll tell you without hesitation: 13,600 toys. That’s quite a lofty number that many people might find hard to wrap their brains around — let alone comfortably commit to. But for Sadie, it’s really just a drop in the ol’ sleigh.
After all, the total number of toys she collected over the past eight years through her Sadie’s Sleigh program is an even larger number.
“This is our ninth year, and if we reach 13,600 toys this year — which we’ve done before — we will have collected 100,000 toys overall,” Sadie said. Her Sadie’s Sleigh program has visited more than 11 hospitals and helped over 30,000 children since its inception. “That represents thousands of smiles on faces. It makes me so incredibly happy. I’ve been there and know how hard their fight is.”
According to the American Childhood Cancer Organization, there are an estimated 15,780 children in the United States between the ages of birth and 19 who are diagnosed with cancer each year. Globally, more than 300,000 children are diagnosed with cancer each year. Sadie, now a junior at Guyer High School, was 7 when she was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. For nearly three years, she went through an array of tests, treatments, and trips to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas and was petrified about what might happen next. Only two months after being diagnosed, she began making videos about what it’s like to have cancer as a child to help other kids not be so afraid. She did these in a closet without her parents knowing.
Fast forward to today, and Sadie is cancer-free. She received her last chemotherapy treatment on May 26, 2017, and continues to receive monthly checkups and lab work while living life as a typical teen. She’s on the varsity tennis team at Guyer and even has a part-time job at Marty B’s Coffee in Bartonville. More inspiring than that, she has become a national advocate, speaker, and activist for raising awareness for childhood cancer through the Sadie Keller Foundation.
Whether handing out toys to kids with cancer, authoring books, or lobbying for key cancer legislation in Washington, she wants to unite people to make a difference in children’s lives. And in Sadie’s eyes, she’s just getting started.
“I think about my journey all the time, and I feel like it gave me so much strength and made me who I am now,” Sadie said. “Sharing my story and raising awareness for childhood cancer in any way I can is a big part of my life. I can’t imagine not doing it.”
While Sadie innocently began her “helping journey” with closet videos, she vividly remembers the day she was inspired to start Sadie’s Sleigh. She was 8 years old and in the middle of another round of chemo when she began to realize that she may end up spending Christmas in the hospital. So she asked her oncologist if Santa Claus had ever visited kids like her during treatments. The oncologist said yes, but that didn’t ease Sadie’s concerns. In her mind, that made Santa’s job that much harder.
So she and her mother, Sarah, devised the idea for Sadie’s Sleigh. This non-profit initiative would collect as many toys as possible and deliver them to children who could not avoid spending Christmas in the hospital. Before Sadie or her family could blink, people came out of the woodwork to donate new, unwrapped toys.
Several hundred items turned into several thousand (over 1,300 gifts were donated that first year worldwide), including tricycles, doll houses, games, and other items.
By the following year, her haul was over 5,000. In 2017, her goal was to collect 10,000 toys.
Over the years, coordinating the distribution of toys has required the help of hundreds of generous people who spread throughout the Metroplex and placed donation boxes at drop-off locations. Black Tie Moving Company then drives around the Dallas-Fort Worth area to collect those full boxes and bring them to Sadie and her team. In recent years, The Shops at Highland Village has donated a clean retail space for Sadie to receive, sticker, sort, and box each toy.
Once every toy has been accounted for, they are delivered to children fighting cancer in hospitals throughout DFW.
Their three main hospital donation sites are Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, and Medical City Children’s Hospital in Dallas.
“It’s something I seriously look forward to every year,” Sadie said. When we caught up with her on November 7, they’d already started passing out drop-off boxes and were about to start Amazon wish lists. “We’ve basically got it all down to a science, and it makes you feel good to see so many people come together to help my mission and support childhood cancer fighters. Many of them have been with us since the very beginning.”
But as previously mentioned, Sadie’s foundation hasn’t stopped there. She also gives gifts year-round to help children celebrate their own personal cancer milestones. Sadie has also gone to Washington, D.C. several times and has helped lobby for the passage of the Creating Hope Act, RACE for Children Act, and the STAR Act. This included being invited to the White House to meet former President Donald Trump as he signed the STAR Act into law in 2018. According to the foundation’s website, out of all the money given to cancer research from the National Cancer Institute, only 4% goes to all childhood cancers. And it has always been Sadie’s mission to change this.
Since starting her foundation, Sadie has been seen on Inside Edition, ESPN, Fox News, Varney & Co., Dana Perino, CNN, NBC Nightly News, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and numerous local television stations across the country.
“It’s crazy to think about everything that has happened over the years,” she said. “I decided long ago that this is something I needed to do, and I genuinely see myself doing this for the rest of my life.”
To learn more about the Sadie Keller Foundation and how to get involved, visit www.sadiekellerfoundation.org.
