We reduce stress in seriously ill children.

It started with a green monkey.

Taylor Carol was eleven when he broke his elbow at a baseball game. The injury should have meant a cast and a few weeks on the bench. Instead, routine tests revealed something entirely out of left field: a near-terminal cancer diagnosis. What followed was years in and out of the hospital.

Through all of it, one thing never left his bedside: a small green monkey his father, Jim, had won at a Disneyland throwing booth. It stayed when the treatments were brutal, when the nights were long, when the hospital had stripped away everything that made a day feel like his own.

What got Taylor through wasn’t only the medicine. It was the small kindnesses that interrupted the hospital’s routine: the nurse who remembered his name, the volunteer who made him laugh, the visitor who, for a few minutes, let him just be a kid again. As Jim tells it, those moments did something the treatments couldn’t: they gave his son hope, and planted a question the family couldn’t shake. What if you could give that feeling to every kid facing serious illness?

That question became GameChanger Charity. A father and son who’d lived the isolation of a children’s ward set out to build, on purpose, the moments Taylor had been handed by chance. The little green monkey got a new name, “Hope,” and became the charity’s mascot and its promise: no child should have to face a serious illness without their childhood.

Today GameChanger helps seriously ill children through the fear, boredom, and isolation that come with health complexity. We do it with comfort, play, technology, and research. The mission is simple: reduce stress in seriously ill children, and give them back moments of relief, connection, and control when illness has taken too much of all three. A new breed of charity.

“Hope is everything. And so Hope is our mascot. Hope lives here.”

Jim Carol, Co-founder