Foundation aims to help kids with cancer

Tom Sutter and his family have turned their own personal tragedy into a force for good.

Since March 2007, Cal’s All-Star Angel Foundation has raised almost $1 million to help children and families dealing with cancer. Sutter’s oldest son Cal died in 2006 after a 14-month battle with leukemia at age 13. To keep the memory of their Little League star alive, Sutter and his wife Stacey started the foundation and began raising money to help terminally ill children celebrate Christmas and grant wishes to those fighting cancers of the blood.

The South Elgin couple, along with their six children, has worked on dozens of fundraising events over the years to run their activities, which also include awarding $10,000 baseball scholarships for college-bound athletes and helping the local Little League with programming expenses.

The Foundation has steadily grown each year, reaching more people all the time.

“It’s kind of like a freight train that’s going downhill faster and faster and it just keeps going,” Tom Sutter said. “It’s a good thing, though; it’s not out of control.”

Cal’s All-Star Angel Foundation sponsored two floors at Children’s Memorial Hospital, where Cal spent the majority of his time during treatment. The 17th and 18th floors — inpatient and outpatient hematology/oncology — were designed by the Chicago Children’s Museum and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and made possible by $200,000 from Cal’s Angels.

The foundation also committed to keeping the play rooms on each floor up to date and stocked with games and art materials.

Both floors will open to the public June 9, just a day after the annual golf outing, dinner and auction — Cal’s Angels’ biggest fundraising event of the year.

The first event the newly formed foundation put on was the golf outing, dinner and auction in June of 2007. They raised $73,000 that year and hope to raise more than $125,000 in the sixth annual event — pushing them just over the $1 million mark for fundraising since the foundation’s start.

The list of golfers is full, but anyone interested in attending the dinner and auction, set for June 8 at Hilton Indian Lakes Resort in Bloomingdale, should email info@calsangels.org or visit calsangels.org for more information.

Sutter spends about 15 hours each week working on duties associated with the Foundation. His wife Stacey spends twice that. From an initial email to about 30 people asking for suggestions on ways to create a legacy for their son, to 2,000 online subscribers of the Cal’s Angels newsletter and another 1,000 who get the hard copy, the foundation has turned into something no one ever guessed it would become.

Sutter said he knows he doesn’t want it to become a full-time job. For starters, he can’t imagine taking money away from donations to fund his salary — right now 95 cents out of each dollar goes to their cause. But also, Sutter worries if the foundation grows too large, he and his wife will be removed from the day-to-day operations. Now, Stacey is incredibly involved with the families Cal’s Angels serves and regularly makes trips to the hospital. Neither of them want to lose that.

“Everybody has great intentions, but we have that connection with people,” Sutter said. “We know what they’re going through. We know exactly what to say.”

But growth is still part of the plan.

Instead of restricting its wish-granting program to children with cancers of the blood, Sutter hopes Cal’s Angels will one day generate enough money to serve all children with cancer. And with the 12 Days of Christmas program, which is meant to spoil terminally ill children and their siblings with toys around the holidays, Sutter hopes to expand beyond Children’s Memorial Hospital.

The future of Cal’s Angels will be a mixture of adding new events and fundraisers and growing the ones already in place.

And while it’s not easy having a constant reminder of the tragedy they experienced, the Sutters are passionate about continuing their work.

“At some point you basically have two choices,” Sutter said. “You can flush your life down the toilet and give up or you can take your tragedies and turn them into a positive force for other people and use your experiences to help them.”

The Sutter family continues to choose the latter.

For details on the foundation, visit calsangels.org.