Joanna Dennstaedt
“Cancer changed everything,” said Joanna Dennstaedt.
Dennstaedt knows firsthand how the disease can negatively impact someone’s life, as she was diagnosed with Stage 3 malignant metastatic melanoma in 2014. But she also understands that there are opportunities for rays of hope to break through what can be a dark time.
To help create more of these bright moments, in 2015, Dennstaedt founded Radiant Hope, an organization dedicated to equipping and supporting those fighting cancer.
Radiant Hope opened its first brick-and-mortar site in Camp Hill in October.
“So now we have a place where people can come and get connected to all of the avenues of support,” Dennstaedt said.
In her sunny, welcoming office, she talked about how the organization was birthed from a care package she received while in treatment.
“So this sunshine package arrived, and that’s where I just felt like, ‘Why am I not doing this for everyone?’” she said.
Dennstaedt and her friends began making care packages for folks who found themselves in difficult times, eventually focusing on those undergoing cancer treatment.
Now, Radiant Hope invites community groups, sports teams, book clubs, civic organizations and anyone who wants to volunteer to have a pack party. Groups purchase the care package items and fill the boxes and water bottles provided by the organization.
To date, Radiant Hope has distributed about 5,000 care packages, each tailored to the person receiving it.
Radiant Hope’s new building allows the organization to expand its services and act as “the local hub for the cancer community,” Dennstaedt explained.
Volunteers assemble care packages.
The facility provides storage and creation space for the care packages and goodie-filled water bottles. Also onsite is space for a wig consultant who works out of the building. Additionally, the nonprofit offers free photography services for families, understanding that pictorial memories are precious.
Radiant Hope also offers respite time for families to escape the hamster wheel of cancer treatment, or to regroup after treatment ends by coordinating weekend getaways.
“We’re finding that sometimes the respite comes after their journey, when they need time to process, to get away, and to breathe,” Dennstaedt said.
Creating Community
Lisa Selan received a Radiant Hope care package during her third round of chemotherapy for metastatic colon cancer—a hopeless time for her. One card changed that.
“I was thinking, ‘Yeah I want to beat this.’ I was up against some pretty dramatic odds, but I had not yet really personalized and solidified the hope in my journey,” Selan said. “I didn’t feel like I had reached a place where I could see hope, and this card, written by number six on the field hockey team at Messiah College, had three simple lines, but one of them resonated with me, ‘There’s hope that God knows the end.’”
That note, and the Chapstick, socks, puzzle books, water bottle, gum and mints, boosted her spirits, and she vowed to get involved with Radiant Hope when she felt better.
Radiant Hope provides water bottles filled with chemo supportive items, like the one Selan received, to infusion centers, so that others can feel that same hug of support.
Now in remission, Selan volunteers at Radiant Hope as an advocate.
“We struggle in society, I think, right now with feeling alone,” Selan said. “When you have a diagnosis of cancer, that just seems to multiply that isolation.”
Jannette Chico-Diaz certainly felt that way. The single mother had little family support and was drowning in the overwhelming experience that is cancer. She was dealing with heightened anxiety and depression and the physical demands of chemotherapy.
“It was to the point that I couldn’t even cook, I was getting so sick,” Chico-Diaz said. “We didn’t have food for Genesis [her daughter]. Miss Lisa is a champion, because she used to bring us food and take us to eat.”
Selan even provided Christmas gifts to Chico-Diaz and her daughter through Radiant Hope’s Holiday Hope program. She also accompanied Chico-Diaz to doctors’ appointments and helped her wade through the medical jargon, taking notes to help clarify everything.
“She was asking all these questions, and I was just sitting down quietly because she knew the right questions to ask to get the right information and because it was a lot of information,” Chico-Diaz said.
During her treatment, Dennstaedt had a village of people taking care of her four children—her husband, family, friends, neighbors and people from church and school. She recognizes that not everyone has that village, so Radiant Hope and its team of 10 is there to help fill the gap.
“You can’t do it alone,” Dennstaedt said. “I feel like the impact of Radiant Hope is so important, that there’s people to surround you. There’s a lot of people that don’t have what I had, so how do we create a community around people that don’t have that?”
While Dennstaedt described her current health as “no evidence of disease,” she keeps the cheerful, yellow package that she received years ago during treatment in her office as a reminder of where she and the organization have come.
Radiant Hope has provided a beauty-from-ashes moment for her, from the crushing blow of diagnosis, to giving her life over to treatment, to fighting her way back to her new normal.
Through it all, she’s realized how willing her community is to help those in need of support.
“People are good at our core and in our hearts. People are so good and they want to help,” Dennstaedt said. “I feel like we just created a place for people to do that.”
Radiant Hope is located at 48 Central Blvd., Camp Hill. For more information, to schedule a pack party or order a care package, visit www.hisradianthope.org.
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