Life-threatening illnesses are enough to deal with even before you have to worry about travel and housing for seeking special treatment, but Brent’s Place, a housing charity near Denver for children and their families receiving treatment for serious illnesses, seeks to ease such fears for those families—and students and citizens in Laramie can help.
“We are a long-term home-away-from-home for families and children who are suffering from cancer or other life-threatening illnesses,” Development Associate Lauren Allison said. “We serve about an eight-state region right now where we’re currently at. Most of our families don’t have access to local care at their hospitals, a lot of times they don’t have bone-marrow transplant units in the local hospitals, so their only option is to come to Denver. We take that off their plate, the whole housing aspect.”
Brent’s Place strives to make its residents comfortable and at ease, beyond simply serving as a place to stay while they deal with the fears and stresses of illness.
“It’s an environment where they feel like they’re at home,” Raleah Cisneros, Cowboy-to-Cowboy associate for the University of Wyoming Alumni Association, said. “They’re not stuck in a hospital all the time, and they can have their family there with them.”
Those at UW may have seen collection boxes for essential cleaning supplies during their daily routines. These will be present all month as the WYO-Gold Student Alumni Association RSO gathers these items to donate to Brent’s Place, and coming up on Friday, March 30 at 6:00 p.m. WYO-Gold is hosting a bowling night at Laramie Lanes.
“We would love for students, faculty and staff, and members of the community, to help us in our donation efforts and to come join us on our bowling night,” Cisneros said. “Anyone can come, and if you bring cleaning supplies to donate you get two games of bowling for free. If you bring a minimum five-dollar donation then you also get [the] two games.”
Cisneros has been part of the association since her days as a student in the RSO, which raises funds for Brent’s Place each year in March through various efforts on campus and around the community.
“We got involved because we actually had a member of the Laramie community that used their services,” Cisneros said. “Their child was sick with cancer—they ended up staying at Brent’s Place, and it’s been just a huge, important cause for them to give back to.”
Brent’s Place often hosts children with immune deficiencies, making contributions of supplies to protect the fragile health of residents especially important. Everything is appreciated, but the most useful items include Clorox cleaning wipes, Windex, laundry detergent and hand soaps, but the list doesn’t end there.
“They obviously need to keep the house as clean and sterile of an environment as possible for their patients,” Cisneros said.
Brent’s Place has worked to make things easier for children patients and their families struggling to deal with the rigors of coming to Denver for treatment opportunities since the Brent Eley Foundation was created in 1997.
Donn and Linda Eley set out to help others deal with the problems they faced when Brent, their own child, was lost to a fast-growing malignant cancer. During his treatment, the family had no nearby treatment options and was forced to relocate to Iowa City for six months. Separated from their community and shouldering the burden of the move themselves, the Eleys rented an apartment while their son spent his final months staying at the hospital.
“We’re the only facility of our kind,” Allison said.
Today, the original Brent’s Place house in Denver is accompanied by a second location in Aurora, Colorado near the acclaimed Children’s Hospital Colorado.
