By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
For the past six years, the ILWU and Alex’s Lemonade Stand have fought childhood cancer side-by-side in Los Angeles through the Walk the Coast fundraising campaign. This effort used to include an annual event at Warehouse 52-57 on Miner Street, featuring classic cars and live performances.
This year is different. In a bid to get more active community involvement, ILWU Walk the Coast is hosting a 5-kilometer race, a one-mile family walk and a one-kilometer kids fun run on Aug. 12. The race starts at 8:30 a.m. at Point Fermin The ILWU chairman of the Walk the Coast Committee, Danny Imbagliazzo, said he hoped participants would use this race as a tune-up for the Conquer the Bridge race that’s scheduled in the coming weeks.
The fundraiser benefits Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a nonprofit organization committed to raising money for childhood cancer research. It’s also the first of what the ILWU intends to be an annual Walk the Coast fundraiser for the anticancer organization.
The pediatric cancer charity was named after Alexandra Scott, who developed cancer only days before reaching her first birthday. Alex was afflicted with neuroblastoma, a common infant cancer that grows out of immature nerves; more than 90 percent of those diagnosed with the cancer are younger than five years of age. Alex’s cancer never went into remission despite ongoing treatments.
When Alex was four years old, her mother, Liz Scott, decided she wanted to do something for children in similar situations. She and her daughter set up a lemonade stand in their front yard to raise money. Their first stand raised $2,000.
News of Alex’s efforts spread quickly and exponentially by word of mouth.
“She would do this every year, before long, people started launching their own lemonade stands and sending money to Alex,” Scott explained to Random Lengths in 2012. “By the time she died, she raised $1 million for a cure for all types of pediatric cancer and not just for her[s.]”
Since that time, the Scotts have grown the event with the help of community organizations and union families nationwide, raising $140 million to fund more than 690 research projects in more than 129 leading pediatric cancer centers.
“I would tell somebody to come and they would tell someone,” Scott said. “Then, someone would call the newspaper to come and there would be a story in the paper. It would become a viral story before there was such thing as ‘going viral.’”
Imbagliazzo has long said that the union’s effort was an expression of its desire to help the community.
“We wanted to do something good and we wanted to do something good with the community for other people,” Imbagliazzo said.
To that end, locals coastwide organize and coordinate numerous events at multiple ports during the same period of time.
Details: www.alexscoastrun.org