Brave Kids

Brave Kids, a new UCP initiative, serves children and youth with disabilities and chronic/life-threatening illnesses by providing a support community, information and resources on numerous medical conditions like genetic diseases, autism, cancer, cerebral palsy, ADD, etc.

History
 

Brave Kids was founded by Kristen Fitzgerald after the loss of her two children to catastrophic illnesses. Kristen pledged that she would redirect the anguish of her own tragic experiences towards easing the suffering of seriously ill children and helping parents avoid the struggle of finding resources and emotional support for their own children. 

On June 9, 1999, Kristen founded the Brave Kids website, and the program and website were successfully launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in March 2000. In collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco; the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and a number of corporate sponsors including Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Network Associates and Hill and Knowlton; the Brave Kids Web site rolled out nationwide in 2002. Brave Kids also donated resource centers to pediatric wards of hospitals in California and Florida.

Future Plans

In  2011, UCP took ownership of the website. UCP is proud to carry on the legacy of Brave Kids and in the coming months will debut a new platform providing the information, resources, and support that Brave Kids visitors have come to trust and rely upon.

UCP will harness the strengths of the current site, including its pre-existing social networking capabilities, to build a resource for parents and children with a spectrum of disabilities, with a focus on ages 6-18. Similar to UCP's ground-breaking My Child Without Limits site -- which provides resources for parents of children ages 0-5 with suspected or diagnosed developmental delays and/or disabilities -- Brave Kids will serve as a “one stop shop” for information, resources, and support on a spectrum of disabilities that affect children and youth.

Visitors will find links to national organizations on resources on a wide variety of diagnoses and conditions. There will also be content relevant to that age group such as school system/educational issues, socialization, adolescence/puberty, bullying, health and wellness. These are issues that impact all children in this age group but even more so for children and youth with disabilities or chronic/life threatening health conditions.

If you are looking for information and resources, please browse through the Resources section or contact the