What Is Dunn4Good?
If you're new here, welcome. Let me tell you what this actually is, without the nonprofit language that usually gets in the way.
Dunn4Good Guild is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit my husband Cory and I started after our son Wesley was diagnosed with high-risk infant leukemia at 11 weeks old. We fund pediatric cancer research through Seattle Children's High-Risk Leukemia Research Program, the same program that treated our son.
That's the short version. Here's the fuller one.
⸻
Wesley living in-patient at Seattle Children’s Hospital with his family as he completed his chemotherapy treatment.
How this started
We didn't set out to start a nonprofit. We were parents of an infant living in a hospital room, trying to understand words like KMT2A rearrangement and event-free survival while our baby was too small to hold his own head up.
We spent over a year in and out of Seattle Children's. In that time, we saw how much research still hadn't caught up to kids like Wesley. Many of the treatments doctors use for infant leukemia were developed decades ago. They work, but they're hard on tiny bodies, and they don't work for every child.
We started Dunn4Good because we couldn't unsee that gap. Once you know it exists, it's hard to just go back to normal life.
⸻
What we actually fund
Every dollar Dunn4Good raises supports Seattle Children's High-Risk Leukemia Research Program. Not overhead. Not a general fund. This program, specifically.
That funding goes toward:
Research into treatments designed for high-risk pediatric leukemia, not adapted from adult protocols
Studies aimed at improving survival outcomes for the highest-risk diagnoses, including infant ALL
Work on reducing long-term side effects, so survival isn't the only goal, quality of life afterward matters too
We're a small organization. We don't have a large staff or a big overhead budget. What we have is a board, a group of volunteers we call the Dunn4Good Guild, and a community that keeps showing up.
⸻
How we raise it
Our biggest event of the year is the Dunn4Good Dinner + Auction, held every September during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Last year's inaugural event raised over $80,000. This year, on September 26, we're gathering again at Hideaway Cellars in Seattle, hoping to raise even more.
Outside of the event, we raise funds through individual donations, corporate matching, and partnerships with local Seattle businesses who believe in what we're building.
⸻
Why we tell Wesley's story
Wesley is at the center of everything we do, and I want to be honest about why.
It would be easier, in some ways, to write generic language about "children with cancer" and leave our family out of it. But specificity is what makes people care. Wesley isn't a statistic. He's a kid who couldn't roll over yet when he started chemotherapy. He's also a kid who just started preschool.
Telling his story honestly, including the hard parts, is how we ask people to care about kids they'll never meet.
⸻
What this means for you
You don't have to have a personal connection to childhood cancer to be part of this. Most of our community doesn't. What you need is a willingness to believe that research changes outcomes, and that a room full of people who show up for one night in September can genuinely move that research forward.
Thank you for reading this far. That alone means you're paying attention to something a lot of people walk past.
Thank you for being here. 💛
With love, The Dunn Family + Dunn4Good Guild ✨