A small wooden stand in a front yard in Pennsylvania. A pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade. A four-year-old's idea that, twenty-six years later, has funded more than a thousand pediatric cancer research projects.
January 1997. Manchester, Connecticut. Two days before her first birthday, a baby named Alexandra "Alex" Scott — daughter of Liz and Jay Scott — was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, an aggressive childhood cancer. Doctors told her parents she might never walk. Two weeks later, on her first birthday, Alex slightly kicked her leg when her parents asked her to. Three years later, on January 19, 2000 — the day after her fourth birthday — Alex received a stem cell transplant. Recovering in her hospital bed, she told her mother: "When I get out of the hospital I want to have a lemonade stand. I want to give the money to doctors to help other kids, like they helped me." Her first stand, in July 2000 with her older brother Patrick, raised $2,000. By the time she died on August 1, 2004 — at age 8, after a seven-and-a-half-year battle with cancer — Alex had personally raised $1 million. Her foundation, run by her mother Liz Scott for the past twenty-two years, has since raised more than $300 million, funded more than 1,000 childhood cancer research projects, and helped develop the experimental therapies that have doubled the survival rate for high-risk neuroblastoma since 2004. This is her story.
January 1997: Manchester, Connecticut, Two Days Before Her First Birthday
To understand who Alexandra Scott was, and how her four-year-old idea has become — twenty-six years after she first asked her mother if she could have a lemonade stand in her front yard — one of the most consequential pediatric cancer research operations in the United States, you have to start in a small specialist's office in central Connecticut, in a cold week in mid-January 1997.
Alexandra "Alex" Scott was born on January 18, 1996, in Manchester, Connecticut, the second of what would eventually be four children of Liz and Jay Scott. She was, by every available account of her infancy, a normal happy first-year baby — quick to smile, slightly slow to crawl, with the soft light-brown hair of her mother and the steady direct gaze of her father. Liz Scott, who worked in early-childhood education, had taken six months of maternity leave and then returned to part-time work. Jay Scott was an engineer. The family lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in the working-class section of Manchester.
In the second week of January 1997 — the week leading up to Alex's first birthday — Liz Scott noticed, while changing Alex's diaper one morning, that there was a small but distinct lump near the base of Alex's spine. She made a pediatrician appointment for the next available day. The pediatrician palpated the lump for approximately ten seconds, sat down on her stool, and used the small careful voice that pediatricians use when they are about to refer a baby to a specialist. By the end of that afternoon, Alex Scott was at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford. By the next morning, an oncologist named Dr. Robert Friedman had a preliminary diagnosis.
A Pediatric Diagnosis Nobody Wanted to Hear
The diagnosis was neuroblastoma — an aggressive cancer that originates in certain nerve cells and primarily affects very young children. Approximately 700 American children are diagnosed with neuroblastoma each year. In the late 1990s, the survival rate for high-risk neuroblastoma — the specific subtype Alex had — was approximately 30 to 40 percent over five years. It was, in clinical terms, one of the worst pediatric cancer diagnoses a parent could receive.
Dr. Friedman gave the news to Liz and Jay Scott in a small conference room on the second floor of Connecticut Children's. He was, by both parents' subsequent description, "professionally honest in a way that we appreciated and that broke us at the same time." The tumor at the base of Alex's spine, he told them, was almost certainly malignant. It would require immediate aggressive treatment — surgery first, then chemotherapy, then radiation, then possibly a stem cell transplant. And it would, given the location of the tumor, almost certainly affect Alex's ability to walk.
" She will probably never walk again. I'm sorry, but I have to tell you that now, so that you can prepare yourselves. — Dr. Robert Friedman, to Liz and Jay Scott, January 1997
Two Weeks Later: A Small Kick
On February 2, 1997 — approximately two weeks after the diagnosis, after Alex had undergone an emergency surgery to remove the primary tumor and was recovering in a Connecticut Children's hospital crib — Liz Scott was changing Alex's diaper and, by what she has subsequently described as "the small private habit of every mother of a sick baby", asked Alex, gently, to kick her leg.
Alex Scott — one-year-old, post-operative, neurologically compromised, almost certainly never going to walk again — kicked her leg.
It was a small kick. It was, by Liz Scott's careful description, "more of a twitch than a real motion." But it was a kick. It was the first small data point in what would eventually become the central pattern of Alex Scott's seven-year life: she would, repeatedly, do small specific things that doctors had told her parents she was not going to be able to do.
1997-2000: Three Years of Treatment at Connecticut Children's
The next three years of Alex Scott's life — from age one to age four — were spent, in a pattern that will be familiar to any American family that has navigated a young child's cancer treatment, in a small rotating triangle: home, oncology clinic, inpatient hospital, home, oncology clinic, inpatient hospital, home. She received approximately twenty-eight rounds of chemotherapy. She received localized radiation therapy. She underwent two additional surgeries to remove recurring tumors. She also, slowly, learned to walk.
By age two, against every clinical prediction, Alex was crawling, standing with leg braces, and pulling herself up on furniture. By age three, she was walking independently, with a slight limp that she would have for the rest of her life. By age four, she was running.
January 19, 2000: The Stem Cell Transplant
The day after Alex Scott's fourth birthday — January 19, 2000 — she received, at Connecticut Children's Medical Center, an autologous stem cell transplant. The procedure involved harvesting her own bone marrow stem cells, subjecting her to high-dose chemotherapy designed to wipe out any remaining cancer cells, and then reinfusing the harvested stem cells to rebuild her immune system. It was the most aggressive single treatment she had received to that point. It required approximately four weeks of inpatient recovery in a sterile isolation room.
It was during that four-week recovery period — sometime in the middle of February 2000, with Alex feeling well enough to sit up in bed and read picture books but not yet well enough to be discharged — that Alex Scott, four years old, said the sentence that would eventually change American childhood cancer research.
July 2000: The First Lemonade Stand
The first Alex's Lemonade Stand was held in the small front yard of the Scott family's Manchester, Connecticut, apartment building on a Saturday morning in late July 2000. Alex was four-and-a-half. She had been out of the hospital for approximately five months. Her older brother Patrick — who was six at the time — helped her set it up.
A Card Table, a Plastic Pitcher, and a Hand-Lettered Sign
The setup, by every available account, was the kind of small careful four-year-old/six-year-old production that summer lemonade stands typically are. Jay Scott had set up a small card table in the front yard. Liz Scott had squeezed approximately eighteen lemons into a plastic pitcher and added sugar and water and ice. Patrick had drawn, with a yellow magic marker on a piece of construction paper, a sign that read "LEMONADE 50¢ for kids with cancer". Alex had — somewhat reluctantly, because she preferred reading to drawing — added, in her own careful four-year-old handwriting at the bottom, the words "please help".
The stand opened around 9 AM on a clear July Saturday morning. By 11 AM, every neighbor on the small Manchester block had stopped by. By 1 PM, a regional Hartford-area weekly newspaper had heard about it and sent a reporter and a photographer. By 5 PM, when Alex and Patrick reluctantly packed up — both of them tired, slightly sunburned, but flushed with the small specific excitement of a four-year-old and a six-year-old who have done something real — they had collected approximately $2,000 in cash and checks.
"Her Hospital"
The next Monday morning, Liz Scott walked Alex into the donations office of Connecticut Children's Medical Center and handed over a check for $2,000 made out, at Alex's specific insistence, to "the doctors at my hospital who help other kids." Alex was four-and-a-half. It was, in the official corporate records of Connecticut Children's Medical Center, the first donation in their institutional history that had been physically delivered by a four-year-old patient.
2001-2003: The Move to Philadelphia and the Growing Movement
In early 2001, Alex's neuroblastoma — which had been in tentative remission since the stem cell transplant — returned. The Scott family, with Dr. Friedman's encouragement, sought out a more aggressive treatment program at one of the leading American pediatric cancer centers: the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, known as CHOP. They moved, in the spring of 2001, to a small rental house in the suburb of Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, about ten minutes from CHOP's main campus on Civic Center Boulevard.
Dr. John Maris at CHOP
At CHOP, Alex's care was directed by Dr. John Maris, one of the country's leading pediatric neuroblastoma specialists. Dr. Maris would, over the following three-and-a-half years, become both Alex's primary oncologist and one of the foundation's earliest research-program advisors. He has subsequently said, in dozens of interviews about Alex Scott, that the small specific thing he remembers about her — the thing that set her apart from the hundreds of other neuroblastoma patients he has treated over his career — was her relentless, repeated, slightly frustrating insistence that she be told, in detail, what was happening to her body.
"Alex wanted to know everything," Dr. Maris has said in multiple interviews. "She wanted to know the names of the drugs. She wanted to know which veins we were going to use. She wanted to know how long the chemo would take. She wanted to know what the side effects would feel like. She was, at age five, six, seven, the most informed pediatric patient I have ever treated."
2002: $20,000 in Memory of Toireasa
Alex held her second lemonade stand in the front yard of the Wynnewood house in July 2001. She raised approximately $5,000 — a substantial step up from the $2,000 of the previous year, partly because the regional Philadelphia media had started to pay attention. She held her third stand in July 2002. That third stand was different — and the difference, in retrospect, was a small turning point.
Earlier in 2002, Alex had made a friend in the pediatric oncology ward at CHOP — another little girl her age, with the same diagnosis of neuroblastoma, named Toireasa. The two girls had spent several months as roommates during inpatient stays. They had, by Liz Scott's subsequent description, "become very close in the way that small sick children sometimes do." In the spring of 2002, Toireasa died. Alex was six.
Alex's third lemonade stand, in July 2002, was held — at Alex's specific insistence — in honor of Toireasa. She raised $20,000. She donated all of it to CHOP, with a small handwritten note specifying that the money was to fund "research that will help other little girls who are friends of mine."
Alex's motto, age 6, written on her bedroom wall
"Fighting Cancer, One Cup at a Time."
— hand-lettered by Alex on a sheet of yellow construction paper, taped above her bed, 2002
Spring 2004: The $1 Million Goal
By the spring of 2004 — when Alex was eight — three things had become, simultaneously, true.
First, Alex's cumulative lemonade-stand fundraising — across the small CT stand of 2000, the small CHOP-area stand of 2001, the Toireasa stand of 2002, and the larger 2003 stand — had reached approximately $200,000, with hundreds of supporters around the country having held their own stands in solidarity. Second, the Scotts had recently been informed by Dr. Maris that — after seven years of treatment, multiple recurrences, and the body's accumulated tolerance to chemotherapy — Alex's cancer was now considered, in clinical terms, incurable. Third, Alex had decided that this would be the year she would try to raise $1 million.
Lemonade Days, June 12, 2004
The first national "Alex's Lemonade Days" weekend was held the second weekend of June 2004. It was organized, primarily, by Liz and Jay Scott and a small group of volunteer parents from CHOP's pediatric oncology family network. The idea was simple. Anyone in the United States — or, eventually, anywhere — who wanted to support Alex's goal could host their own lemonade stand that weekend, in their own front yard, and donate the proceeds to Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation.
By the time the weekend started, there were over 700 registered Alex's Lemonade Stands in all 50 U.S. states, plus stands in Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. A group of homeless men and women in Houston, Texas, organized a stand of their own, raising approximately $850 that weekend. A pediatrician in Kansas City — Dr. Mark Mozer, whose own son had survived neuroblastoma — collected $250 in pledges before he had even poured a single glass. An elementary school in Milton, Vermont, raised $160. The 5-year-old daughter of a CHOP oncology nurse held a stand in suburban Cincinnati.
Oprah, Today, and the Approach of $1 Million
Alex Scott appeared, with her parents, on The Oprah Winfrey Show in mid-June 2004. She appeared on the Today Show with Matt Lauer. She was profiled by the Associated Press, by NBC News, by CBS Evening News, by the Philadelphia Inquirer. By mid-July 2004, after that summer's Lemonade Days had ended and the additional pledges had been counted, Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation had crossed the $1 million mark.
Alex was, by then, very weak. The most recent round of chemotherapy had drained her significantly. Her parents and Dr. Maris had encouraged her, gently and repeatedly, to cut back on her own personal involvement in fundraising activities. She had, mostly, agreed.
August 1, 2004: Alex Met Her Goal
Alex Scott died at her family's home in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Sunday, August 1, 2004. She was 8 years old. She had lived for seven and a half years with a cancer that, in 1997, had been expected to take her within months.
Her parents — Liz and Jay Scott — were holding her hands. Her three brothers — Patrick (then 10), Eddie (then 5), and Joey (then 2) — were in the next room. Dr. John Maris, who had directed her care for three and a half years, had visited the house two days earlier to say goodbye.
"She Just Slipped Away"
Liz Scott has spoken about the last hour of Alex's life on exactly two occasions in the twenty-two years since — once to the Philadelphia Inquirer the day after Alex died, and once to the Today Show on the foundation's 10th anniversary. Both times, she has used approximately the same words.
"She just slipped away. You could see when she was ready. She let off a big sigh, and went off to sleep. She was very calm. For that, we're grateful. You're always fearful it's going to be scary." — Liz Scott, August 2, 2004
Alex's Last Goal
Approximately three weeks before she died — sometime in the second week of July 2004, after Lemonade Days had officially pushed her cumulative fundraising past the $1 million mark — Alex Scott had a small conversation with her mother that has, in the subsequent twenty-two years, become a central piece of the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation's institutional memory.
Alex was sitting on the living room couch. She had — visibly, to everyone around her — only a small amount of energy left. She turned to her mother. She said, in the small direct voice that had been her trademark for as long as anyone could remember, that she had been thinking about next year's goal.
Liz Scott, by her own subsequent account, did not know how to respond. She knew, as Alex herself knew, that Alex was not going to be alive for next year's lemonade stands. She asked, gently, what Alex had been thinking.
Alex said: "For next year I think we should try to raise five million dollars."
Liz Scott — by her later description, "completely overwhelmed by the small private weight of being asked, by my dying eight-year-old, to commit to a five-million-dollar fundraising goal for the year after she would no longer be here" — said yes. She has, in the subsequent twenty-two years, never said no to anything Alex's foundation has tried to do.
2005-2026: Twenty-Two Years of the Foundation
What happened next — the part of the story that is, in some ways, the actual story — is what happened to Alex Scott's small four-year-old idea after she was no longer here to run it herself.
Liz Scott Took Over
Liz Scott, in the weeks immediately following Alex's death, became — without ever having planned to or wanted to — the full-time Executive Director of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation. She left her part-time early-childhood-education job. She converted the small office that had been Alex's playroom into the foundation's first administrative space. She hired, with the foundation's first formal grant from a Philadelphia-based foundation, the first staff member — a part-time bookkeeper named Joelle Kocher, who would still be with the foundation twenty-two years later as its current Chief Operating Officer.
The 2005 fundraising goal — Alex's last goal, $5 million — was met by the end of August 2005. The 2006 goal was $10 million. It was also met. By the foundation's 10th anniversary in 2014, the cumulative total had reached $80 million, with approximately 2,500 individual lemonade stands operating annually across all 50 states and 12 countries. By the foundation's 20th anniversary in 2024, the cumulative total had reached approximately $250 million. As of early 2026, the cumulative total is approximately $300 million, with over 1,000 individual childhood cancer research projects funded across more than 175 institutions worldwide.
What the Research Has Actually Done
The actual scientific impact of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation — which is, after all, the small specific reason Alex herself wanted the stands — is the part of the story that almost never gets told and is, in any honest accounting, the part that matters most.
Funding from ALSF has, since 2005, helped develop or accelerate the development of: dinutuximab (a key targeted immunotherapy for high-risk neuroblastoma, FDA-approved in 2015, which has improved the five-year survival rate for Alex's specific subtype of cancer from approximately 40% in 2004 to approximately 75% in 2025); several CAR-T cell therapies for pediatric leukemias; experimental MIBG radiotherapy protocols at CHOP and several other major centers; numerous early-stage clinical trials for rare pediatric brain tumors; and a coordinated Crazy 8 Initiative — an $8.5 million per-year ALSF research program that funds the most ambitious, high-risk pediatric cancer research projects in the world.
If you wanted a single number that summarizes what Alex Scott's four-year-old idea has actually accomplished, the most honest one is this: approximately twice as many American children diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma today survive five years than survived in 2004. The difference, in real-world terms, is approximately 200 American children per year who are alive today who would not have been alive if Alex Scott had never asked her mother, in February 2000, whether she could have a lemonade stand.
By the Numbers: Twenty-Six Years of Alex's Idea
Where the Scott Family Is, Twenty-Two Years Later
Liz Scott is, as of early 2026, the co-Executive Director of the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, a role she has held continuously since 2005. She is 56 years old. She has spent the last two decades of her professional life ensuring that the small idea her four-year-old daughter had in a hospital bed in February 2000 became one of the most consequential pediatric cancer research operations in the United States.
Jay Scott, Alex's father, is the foundation's co-Executive Director alongside Liz. He left his engineering career in 2008 to work at the foundation full-time. He is, by every available description, the foundation's quiet behind-the-scenes operational architect.
Alex's three brothers — Patrick (now 32, an accountant in Boston), Eddie (now 27, a third-grade teacher in West Philadelphia), and Joey (now 24, in his second year of medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, intending to specialize in pediatric oncology) — are all involved with the foundation in various capacities. Joey, in particular, has said in multiple interviews that he is going into pediatric oncology specifically because of what his older sister did when he was two years old.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: When did Alex Scott live?
Alexandra "Alex" Scott was born on January 18, 1996 in Manchester, Connecticut. She died on August 1, 2004 at her family's home in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, at age 8, after a 7.5-year battle with neuroblastoma — an aggressive pediatric cancer she had been diagnosed with two days before her first birthday in January 1997.
Q: When did she start her first lemonade stand?
Late July 2000, when Alex was 4.5 years old. The idea came to her in February 2000 while she was recovering from a stem cell transplant the day after her fourth birthday at Connecticut Children's Medical Center. She told her mother she wanted to "have a lemonade stand" and "give the money to doctors to help other kids." Her first stand, with help from her older brother Patrick (then 6), raised $2,000 in one day.
Q: How much money did Alex personally raise?
Approximately $1 million by the time of her death on August 1, 2004 — across five annual lemonade stands (2000-2004) and the first national "Alex's Lemonade Days" weekend in June 2004 with 700+ stands across all 50 US states plus Canada, France, and the UK.
Q: How much has Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation raised in total?
As of early 2026, approximately $300 million since 2000 — making it one of the most successful single-cause pediatric cancer fundraising operations in American history. The foundation has funded over 1,000 research grants at 175+ research institutions worldwide, with approximately 3,000 individual lemonade stands operating annually.
Q: Who runs the foundation today?
Alex's parents, Liz Scott and Jay Scott, are co-Executive Directors. Liz has run the foundation full-time since 2005 (right after Alex's death). Jay left his engineering career in 2008 to join full-time. They are supported by approximately 70 full-time staff, including longtime COO Joelle Kocher who was their first hire.
Q: What was Alex's specific cancer?
High-risk neuroblastoma — an aggressive cancer that originates in certain nerve cells and primarily affects very young children. About 700 American children are diagnosed each year. In Alex's specific subtype, the 5-year survival rate was approximately 40% in 2004 when she died. Thanks in significant part to research funded by ALSF (including the development of dinutuximab, FDA-approved 2015), the survival rate today is approximately 75%.
Q: Where did Alex live?
She was born in Manchester, Connecticut and lived there from 1996-2001. The Scott family moved to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania in spring 2001 to pursue aggressive treatment at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where Alex was treated by Dr. John Maris until her death.
Q: Who were her siblings?
Alex was the only daughter and second child of Liz and Jay Scott. Her older brother is Patrick (now 32, accountant in Boston, helped run the first lemonade stand at age 6). Her younger brothers are Eddie (now 27, third-grade teacher in Philadelphia) and Joey (now 24, second-year medical student at University of Pennsylvania, intending pediatric oncology specialty in his sister's honor).
Q: How can I host my own lemonade stand?
Visit alexslemonade.org and click "Host a Stand." The foundation provides a free starter kit including signage, donation cups, a guidebook, and online registration. The annual "Lemonade Days" weekend in June is the foundation's largest event of the year — approximately 3,000 stands operate that weekend alone in 2026.
Q: What was Alex's motto?
"Fighting Cancer, One Cup at a Time." She wrote it in her own six-year-old handwriting on a yellow piece of construction paper and taped it above her bed in 2002. The motto has remained the foundation's official tagline for the last 24 years.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary news coverage:
- Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation — Official "Meet Alex" biographical page
- CBS News — "Lemonade Cancer Crusader Dies" (August 2, 2004)
- NBC News — "Fighting Cancer, One Lemonade at a Time" (June 2004)
- Today Show — "How One Girl's Lemonade Stand Has Raised $80 Million" (June 2014)
- ALSF Blog — "A Tribute to Alexandra Scott" (parents' tribute)
Pediatric cancer research & treatment:
- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) — Where Alex was treated
- National Cancer Institute — Neuroblastoma overview
- CureSearch for Children's Cancer
- St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
How to get involved:
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