A nonprofit devoted to childhood cancer research will hold a Benefit Bash at The Georgia Aquarium, Friday, with a goal of raising $3.2 million.
More than 700 people are expected to attend the Rally Foundation’s sold-out 17th annual Benefit Bash. The event, which is co-chaired by Delta Air Lines President-International Alain Bellemare and Altium President and CEO Sean Fallmann, will include cocktails and gourmet food stations, silent and live auctions and more.
The Bash was not something that Rally co-founders Dean and Reid Crowe imagined when a young family friend, William Olson, was suffering from childhood brain cancer in 2005.
Since that year, the Rally Foundation has awarded more more than $35 million dollars in peer reviewed grants for childhood cancer research, Dean Crowe said.
“When we started Rally, part of our mission was to fund the very best research we could find, and we don’t really care where it is in the world,” she said.
William and his mother Nancy inspired the Crowes to make childhood cancer research their mission.
In 2005, then-17-year-old William was battling a brain tumor that he was first diagnosed with four years earlier. He was considered family to the Crowes. William and their son grew up together playing on an East Cobb baseball travel team.
During an 18-month period of William’s cancer journey, Dean Crowe was a leader of a prayer circle that took place every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning in the Olson’s driveway.
And when Crowe saw that William could barely keep down small sips of a smoothie during a hospital stay, she asked Nancy Olson what she could do to help.
Olson’s response: “Raise money for childhood cancer research, and it needs to be for all childhood cancers,” the women recalled.
“Children tend to get cancers that are different from adults, and they tend to get a bunch of different brain tumors than adults don’t get,” Crowe told SaportaReport.
“Kids’ little cells are growing and multiplying every day,” Olson added. “And an exponential number of cells each day are being damaged from the chemotherapy and radiation because their bodies are growing.”
In 2006, The Rally Foundation awarded its first grant to Emory University for $5,000.
Rally has given $2.5 million to Emory University since that first grant in ’06, including $350,000 donated this year, Crowe said.
Rally has 60 experts on its Medical Advisory Board. Two of the experts review and score each grant application.
The grants have led to millions of dollars of additional funding by other researchers and organizations worldwide, Crowe said.
William died in 2012 at the age of 25 after graduating from Auburn University with a degree in chemical engineering.
“He was in a wheelchair, but he graduated and it was a big deal,” his mother said. “He had a lot of passion for living. He had a lot of passion for making the world a better place.”
“A couple of nights before he died. We were reading scripture, and he said, ‘Well, I guess God’s purpose for me is helping people get rid of childhood cancer.”
In William’s honor, the Rally Foundation has established the annual William Olson Impact Award. Dr. Gregory Friedman of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center was named the 2024 winner in August for his commitment to “caring for kids fighting cancer and discovering new treatments,” the Rally Foundation website states.
