CanTeen

We get it. Just when life should be full of possibilities, cancer crashes into a young person’s world and shatters everything. Cancer pushes them back in to the nest, makes them grow up too fast and weighs them down with worries they’re not supposed to have yet.

Canteen is the game changer. We help young people cope with cancer in their family. Through Canteen, they learn to explore and deal with their feelings about cancer, connect with other young people in the same boat and if they’ve been diagnosed themselves, we also provide specialist, youth-specific treatment teams.

By feeling understood and supported, young people develop resilience and can rebuild the foundations that crumbled beneath them when cancer turned their life upside down. That’s how Canteen is the difference.

Canteen works by having young people at the centre of everything we do. We were set up by a group of young cancer patients in 1985 and still have young people affected by cancer guiding the organisation at every level. Combined with our leading edge research into the emotional and social impacts of cancer, it ensures that we truly understand how cancer is different in a young person’s world.