The Israeli foundation Chance for Life supports children with cancer and their families who arrive in the country without their usual support network. According to the foundation’s founder, Inna Bakhareva, the work began as private visits to hospitals and homes, and only later became a formal organization. The group has officially existed for ten years, although the work itself started about 13 years ago.
The foundation covers needs that, in Bakhareva’s words, “fall through the cracks” between different support systems: medicines, psychological assistance, help for mothers, hospital accompaniment, support for siblings, and regular visits to pediatric wards.
The team includes people from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Moldova. They come from very different professions and life stories. Olga, 42, who moved from Moscow after the start of the full-scale war, says she was in shock on February 24, joined an anti-war rally, and spent a night at a police station after being detained. In Israel, she found it difficult to begin new volunteer work while feeling she had left behind people she had supported in Russia.
Another volunteer, Rita from Kyiv, left Ukraine at 16. She recalls evacuation through Moldova and Romania, fear for her relatives, and concern for her father, who stayed in Kyiv to work as a doctor. Rita says she chose to volunteer because she wants to become a physician and understands how important it is for sick children in a foreign country to feel at home and understood.
After the start of the war in Ukraine, Bakhareva says the foundation’s previous model of work collapsed almost immediately: support from Russia disappeared, some volunteers moved into Ukrainian aid initiatives, and the number of families needing help rose sharply. At that time, a special flight from Okhmatdyt in Kyiv arrived in Israel, and the foundation took in families who had come without belongings, documents, or any clear sense of what would happen next.
A new test came with the war in Israel after October 7. Hospitals switched to emergency mode, families lived in shelters, and treatment procedures took place under sirens. The foundation began visiting families not only in hospitals but also at home, bringing food and medicine. One of the hardest moments for the team was the death, on the night of June 16, 2025, of a girl from Odesa named Nastya and her relatives when an Iranian missile hit the house where they were living after coming for treatment.
“When it is about a child with cancer, everything else stops mattering,” Inna Bakhareva says, explaining how the foundation unites people with different experiences, views, and traumas.