HEADstrong Makes a Home in Swarthmore for Families of Cancer Patients

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The HEADstrong Foundation Swarthmore Home
The HEADstrong Foundation purchased this home in Swarthmore with the intent to provide housing for cancer patients and their caretakers. Image via Clem Murray, Philadelphia Inquirer.

It’s fighting for the families whose loved ones are fighting for their lives.

And despite a Delaware County Court lawsuit, the HEADstrong Foundation’s new $700,000 home for visiting cancer patients and their families is winning the battle.

HEADstrong is converting the 5,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion in Swarthmore to a free home away from home, modeled after “Nick’s House” above its headquarters in Ridley Township, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer report by Caitlin McCabe.

The project has been approved by Swarthmore’s Planning Commission and backed by the Swarthmore Borough Council, but some neighbors are opposed on grounds that the accommodation would be unreasonable for 14 unrelated people and the traffic would become a burden, the article explained.

“We become a key component in their process,” HEADstrong President Cheryl Colleluori said of cancer patients’ families. “They are leaving behind everything they know … their friends, their family, their support system, their jobs. They are coming to a strange town, and it’s very unnerving because it’s unfamiliar territory and they are already in a circumstance that they are unfamiliar with.”

And Colleluori knows first-hand that experience. The namesake of “Nick’s House” was her son, who lost his battle to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“We would have four kids, plus my husband and I, staying in an 8-by-10-foot room, sleeping on air mattresses,” she said.

HEADstrong’s new house needs an elevator, more parking, and interior restoration, though the labor for almost all of it is being volunteered.

Read more about the new HEADstrong home for cancer patients in Swarthmore in the Philadelphia Inquirer here.

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