Our Mission
Our mission is to deliver joy, comfort, and quality of life to children with cancer and their families through free integrative therapies and holistic support.
Our Vision
A New England where no family facing childhood cancer faces it without access to integrative therapies, dedicated sibling support, and care for the caregivers who make everything possible.
Where This Mission Came From
Love Bus was not built from a strategic planning session. It was built from a child's experience.
Lucy Grogan was a child navigating cancer treatment when she discovered something that troubled her deeply: the integrative therapies that were helping her — massage, acupuncture, and others — were out of reach for many of the children around her. Not because those therapies weren't available. Because families couldn't afford them.
That gap was unacceptable to her. And so, while in her hospital bed in 2006, she founded Lucy's Love Bus — an organization built on a straightforward conviction: that the financial circumstances of a family should never determine whether a child with cancer has access to comfort care.
Twenty years later, that conviction is unchanged. The organization has grown, the name has slightly changed, the hospital partnerships have deepened, the geographic reach has expanded across all six New England states — but the founding premise is exactly the same. No child should be left out because of cost. Not then. Not now.
What We Stand For
Love Bus operates from a small number of deeply held beliefs that shape everything from program design to eligibility criteria to how we talk about the families we serve.
- Comfort is not a luxury. Integrative therapies reduce pain, nausea, anxiety, and fatigue in ways that matter to a child's quality of life and a family's ability to endure a cancer journey. They are part of comprehensive care.
- The whole family deserves support. A child with cancer does not go through treatment alone. Their siblings carry it. Their caregivers carry it. Love Bus was built to hold all of them.
- Access should never depend on ability to pay. Every Love Bus service is free to qualifying families — no insurance, no income threshold, no exceptions. This is not a program feature. It is the mission.
- Support should last as long as it is needed. Love Bus serves families through active treatment, remission, long-term survivorship, and hospice. Eligibility does not end when a treatment cycle does.
Our Vision for What Comes Next
Love Bus has served New England families for over two decades. What we are building toward is a region where the gap Lucy Grogan identified in 2006 no longer exists — where every qualifying family in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine can access integrative therapies, sibling programming, and caregiver support without cost, without friction, and without having to know the right person to ask.
We are not there yet. We are actively expanding hospital partnerships, deepening our reach into underserved geographies, and building the infrastructure to serve more families in the years ahead. The founding mission is the destination. Everything we do is moving toward it.
Questions About Our Mission and Vision
What is Love Bus's mission statement?
Love Bus's mission is to provide free integrative therapies and whole-family support to children diagnosed with cancer before age 21, their siblings, and their caregivers across all six New England states — at every phase of the cancer journey and at no cost to qualifying families.
Why was Love Bus founded?
Love Bus was founded in 2006 by Lucy Grogan, a child with cancer who recognized that the integrative therapies helping her through treatment were financially out of reach for many of her peers. She founded the organization to remove that barrier permanently — ensuring that no child's access to comfort care would be determined by what their family could afford.
What are Love Bus's values?
Love Bus operates from four core beliefs: that comfort is part of comprehensive cancer care, that the whole family deserves support, that access should never depend on ability to pay, and that support should last as long as it is needed. These values are not aspirational — they are reflected in every program and eligibility decision the organization makes.
What is Love Bus's vision for the future?
Love Bus's vision is a New England where no family facing childhood cancer goes without access to integrative therapies, sibling support, and caregiver care. The organization is actively expanding hospital partnerships, group program partner sites, and language access to close the gap that Lucy Grogan identified when she founded it in 2006.
