Mabazza Foundation Awarded $9,999 Grant to Support Boston Veterans Facing Cancer
Bridge the Gap Mini Grant · June 2026
Care carried in a backpack. Dignity carried much further.
The Mabazza Foundation has been awarded $9,999 to expand hospital-based wellness support for Boston veterans undergoing cancer treatment.
Meeting the realities of treatment with practical care.
The funded project, Art That Heals: Phase II, Hospital-Based Wellness for Boston Veterans, will create Healing Backpacks for veterans moving through cancer treatment.
Cancer care is rarely confined to a hospital room. It can bring transportation challenges, financial pressure, housing concerns, food insecurity, caregiver strain, emotional isolation, and the exhausting responsibility of navigating several systems at once.
The Healing Backpacks project was created in recognition of those overlapping realities. Each backpack will combine useful supplies, wellness materials, art, encouragement, and access to carefully organized community resources.
This grant allows the Mabazza Foundation to respond with something tangible, thoughtful, and deeply human.
Comfort, information, and connection in one place.
Each part of the project has been designed to meet a different dimension of the treatment journey.
A veteran may need something comforting during an infusion, somewhere to record questions before an appointment, help finding transportation, or a reliable number to call when stress becomes too heavy. These needs may appear small from the outside, but during treatment they can determine whether someone feels supported or left to navigate alone.
Healing Backpacks
Carefully selected comfort and wellness items, practical supplies, printed encouragement cards, and art-based reflection materials for treatment visits, appointments, and recovery days.
A lasting support guide
A professionally designed Boston Veterans Cancer Support Guide connecting veterans and caregivers with medical, social, financial, transportation, housing, and community resources.
Art-centered care
Healing imagery and reflective materials that soften the clinical experience and affirm that every person remains more expansive than an illness, appointment, or diagnosis.
A companion for the road through treatment.
The Healing Backpack is intended to remain useful long after it is first received. It can travel to appointments, sit beside a treatment chair, hold documents and notes, and provide small moments of comfort during long or uncertain days.
The accompanying support guide is not being created as a disposable flyer. It is designed as a practical companion that can remain beside appointment papers, discharge instructions, medication lists, benefit information, and caregiver notes.
Together, the backpack and guide say something important without requiring a veteran to ask first: your experience has been considered, and your needs deserve thoughtful attention.
Turning a maze of services into a clearer path.
Cancer treatment can require a person to become a patient, scheduler, benefits researcher, transportation coordinator, and record keeper all at once.
The resource guide will bring essential information together in one organized and approachable place, helping veterans and caregivers identify the next call, question, or source of support.
The guide is being designed for real-life use during a demanding season of care.
It will include practical information alongside space for appointment notes and care planning, allowing each veteran or caregiver to adapt it to their own journey.
Art can hold what clinical language leaves behind.
Treatment addresses the body. Healing must also make room for memory, identity, fear, hope, stillness, and emotional release.
The artwork incorporated into the Healing Backpacks and resource guide comes from the Mabazza Foundation’s broader healing-arts mission. These images are not decoration added at the end. They are part of the care itself.
Art can soften an unfamiliar space, offer somewhere for the eyes and mind to rest, and remind a veteran that life continues to contain beauty even while treatment asks so much.
Most importantly, it can affirm the person beyond the diagnosis.
You are not alone.
Your care matters.
Your story matters.
Every backpack is intended to carry this message into treatment rooms, waiting areas, recovery days, and the quieter hours when reassurance may be needed most.
Caring for veterans also means supporting the people beside them.
Cancer care is rarely carried by one person alone.
Caregivers, family members, social workers, nurses, patient navigators, peer supporters, and community partners often form the human bridge between a veteran and the assistance they need.
The Healing Backpacks and support guide are designed to make that shared work easier by placing useful information, planning tools, comfort, and encouragement within reach.
Practical dignity
Useful tools, comfort items, art, and organized resources that recognize both the logistical and emotional realities of care.
A clearer place to begin
Information and planning space that can help families coordinate appointments, questions, benefits, transportation, and support.
Resources within reach
A thoughtful tool that nurses, social workers, navigators, and community organizations can reference while assisting veterans.
A grant-funded step forward
Where art, compassion, and practical assistance meet.
The Bridge the Gap Mini Grant allows the Mabazza Foundation to expand its hospital-based wellness work and bring meaningful, art-centered support to Boston veterans receiving cancer care.
We are grateful for this investment in veteran care and community healing. It strengthens our ability to create programs that respond not only to illness, but also to the human experience surrounding it.
We extend that gratitude to every veteran, caregiver, healthcare professional, artist, volunteer, community partner, and supporter who continues to help this work move forward.