Members of Crafting for Cancer may come for the hobby, but they stay for the cause.

UCLA’s Crafting for Cancer is a club dedicated to supporting people affected by cancer. Members crochet beanies to donate to the Jessie Rees Foundation and make other handmade items to sell for quarterly fundraisers, with all proceeds going to cancer support organizations across Southern California. Charlene Guo, a third-year neuroscience student, will be returning as the club’s president in the fall.

“A lot of people just think of crochet as a personal hobby where you just make stuff,” Guo said. “It’s important for people to recognize that there are so many different ways that you can help others – you just have to be able to go find those opportunities for yourself.”

The Jessie Rees Foundation is a pediatric cancer nonprofit dedicated to fulfilling the late 12-year-old Jessie Rees’ wish of encouraging children with cancer through community support and the distribution of toy-filled JoyJars – large plastic jars stuffed with hospital-approved toys for cancer patients. Guo said the beanies crocheted during Crafting for Cancer meetings are donated to children with cancer through the foundation, giving members a direct application of their work.

Beyond the beanies, members have creative freedom to make other handmade items, such as jellyfish keychains, frog stuffed animals and miniature fish, to sell at quarterly fundraisers that often are hosted on Bruin Walk. This spring, however, the club held its final fundraiser of the year at the Clarkia Flower Festival in UCLA’s Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, a setting Guo said they may return to in the fall.

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This final fundraiser brings the year’s total raised to nearly $1,500, Guo said.

“I’m really hoping that we can continue to make this impact in the upcoming school year,” Guo said. “At our fundraisers we don’t keep any of the money we make. One hundred percent of it is donated, and I think it would be really great to just keep investing back into the community.”

Vice President Anne Xu, a second-year computational biology student, said the club offered a way to contribute to the cause and community in a non-clinical setting that counted toward service hours, while still making a real impact. This impact became clear to her at the Clarkia Flower Festival, she said, when strangers approached the table throughout the day, drawn not just to what the club was selling but to what it meant.

“People were coming up to the table and being like, ‘I love what you guys do. It’s such a great mission,'” Xu said. “They were talking about how they had family members who had cancer, or (were) cancer survivors themselves.”

For club secretary Nicole Matar, a fourth-year psychology student, the cause is even more personal. She said cancer had touched those in her life before she ever joined the club, and when she spotted a flyer on campus last year, the mission was what ultimately drew her in.

“You don’t think it’s (a cancer diagnosis) going to happen to someone close to you or someone in your life, and it does, and that kind of just changes your perspective,” Matar said. “I like the hobby, but it’s more so about what the club stands for.”

Xu said she didn’t know how to crochet at all when she first joined but found that it didn’t matter. The club is open to all skill levels, with board members and loyal attendees available to teach newcomers and welcome new members throughout the year, Xu said.

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The club meets every Wednesday from 6-7 p.m., with all supplies provided free of charge. Members can also pay an optional fee for unlimited material access throughout the year so they can crochet on their own time and donate items back to the club when they can, Guo said. Because attendance is never tracked, she said, the meetings stay exactly what they sound like – a low-stakes place to make something, meet someone new and unwind after class.

“At first, I just really wanted to have another space where I could meet other people who really liked doing this,” Guo said. “But the more time I spent there, I found a community of people who were not only passionate about this hobby but were also passionate about the cause.”

Similarly, Matar said she initially wanted to join the club to force herself to continue developing her crocheting skills, as she said it can be a hobby that phases in and out and is hard to get back into. When she met the people in the club, she said she found that she simply enjoyed hanging out with them which inspired her to start going to meetings more.

“It’s just super nice to find people that share your same hobbies – it’s how you connect,” Matar said. “When you find people through volunteering or through that kind of stuff, it’s like you know that they’re good-hearted people. It’s been super easy to find a community in that regard, because I knew that they were already coming from a good place.”

Like Matar, Guo said the impact is what makes the club so great for her.

“The experience of working with a community of people to contribute towards this great cause is something that I will take with me no matter where I go,” Guo said.