“Before the Children Get Better”: Inside Turkey’s Most Trusted Cancer Foundation

There is a phrase that runs like a thread through everything LÖSEV does — through its hospital corridors, its volunteer briefings, its donation appeals, its social-media posts at midnight when a child’s test results have come back and the family has nowhere left to turn. “Önce Çocuklar İyileşsin.” Before the children get better. It is a motto, a mission statement and, for the 118,000 patients and families registered with the foundation, something closer to a promise.

LÖSEV — Lösemili Çocuklar Sağlık ve Eğitim Vakfı, or the Leukaemia Children’s Health and Education Foundation — was established in Istanbul in 1998 at a moment when Turkey’s public health system was ill-equipped to absorb the full cost of childhood cancer. Twenty-seven years on, it is widely regarded as one of the most trusted civil-society organisations in Turkey, operating across a span of services so comprehensive that it effectively functions as a parallel welfare state for the families it serves.

What LÖSEV Actually Does

The foundation’s scope is unusually broad. At its centre is LÖSANTE, a dedicated children’s and adult oncology hospital in Ankara at which treatment is provided entirely free of charge to registered patients. But LÖSEV’s reach extends well beyond the clinical. Families who must travel long distances for treatment — from the Black Sea coast, from the Kurdish south-east, from villages in the Aegean hinterland — are offered free accommodation. Children who fall behind on their schooling during treatment receive educational support. Psychological counselling is available to patients and to their parents, who frequently carry the secondary trauma of a diagnosis alongside the logistical and financial devastation it brings.

Then there is the material support. LÖSEV distributes food parcels, household staples and hygiene products to families throughout the year. Cash transfers are made directly to the bank accounts of patients whose circumstances are most precarious. Social workers — the foundation’s own description is quietly heroic — travel to every corner of Turkey, “in snow and cold, near and far,” to visit registered patients at home, assess their needs and connect them to whatever combination of services the foundation can provide.

The scale of this operation is difficult to convey in a single figure, but one number offers a sense of it: eight million volunteers are involved in LÖSEV’s network, including recovered young patients and family committee members who have become advocates for the foundation that supported them during their own crises.

Cancer Is Rising — and the Need Is Growing

The backdrop to all of this is a public health trend that LÖSEV’s officials speak about with undisguised alarm. Cancer rates in Turkey are increasing. The precise drivers are contested — changes in diet and lifestyle, environmental factors, improved diagnosis rates that bring previously invisible cases into the statistics — but the effect on the foundation’s caseload is unambiguous. “Unfortunately, cancer is increasing rapidly,” the charity’s communications acknowledge, in the blunt register of an organisation that has watched this trajectory up close for nearly three decades.

Turkey’s public healthcare system has expanded dramatically since the early 2000s, and access to treatment has improved substantially. But the costs associated with a serious diagnosis — the travel, the lost income, the accommodation, the nutritional and psychological needs that fall outside standard clinical provision — remain significant, and for lower-income families they can be catastrophic. LÖSEV exists in that gap.

The Foundation’s Model: Trust, Transparency and Field Work

One of the most striking features of LÖSEV’s operation is the emphasis it places on verification. Before distributing material support, the foundation conducts detailed field assessments to ensure that aid reaches the families for whom it is intended. In a country where charity fraud has periodically damaged public confidence in civil-society organisations, this methodical approach has been central to LÖSEV’s reputation. Turkish polling consistently places it among the most trusted foundations in the country.

The foundation accepts donations in several forms: through all Turkish bank branches and ATM donation screens, through PTT post offices across Turkey, via SMS (texting BAGIS to 3406, or FİTRE to 1998 on Turkish networks), and directly through LÖSEV offices. Zakāt, fitre, fidye and general donations are all channelled into the foundation’s work with cancer patients and their families. Crucially, LÖSEV holds public-benefit foundation status — its operations are subject to oversight, and donors can be confident that contributions are traceable.

A Cause That Crosses Borders: The UK Diaspora Connection

For the Turkish-heritage community in Britain — estimated at somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 people, concentrated in London boroughs such as Hackney, Haringey and Enfield as well as in Birmingham and Manchester — LÖSEV is not an abstract foreign charity. It is, for many, the organisation that treated a cousin, housed an uncle during chemotherapy, or provided the food parcel that kept a family going through a winter when the breadwinner could not work.

That personal connection drives diaspora giving. International donors can support LÖSEV through its website at losev.org.tr, which allows overseas bank transfers and credit card donations. The foundation’s helpline (00 90 312 447 06 60) is accessible from the UK, and its offices can advise on the most appropriate form of giving depending on the donor’s circumstances.

There is also a broader significance to that diaspora engagement. British-Turkish giving to LÖSEV is, in a modest way, part of the story of how migrant communities maintain meaningful ties to their countries of origin — not through nostalgia or cultural performance alone, but through the unglamorous, practical work of keeping institutions alive. A foundation that can count on the support of London as well as Ankara, of Birmingham as well as Bursa, is a foundation with a genuinely transnational constituency. That matters for its sustainability, and it matters for the families in Diyarbakır or Trabzon who depend on it.

What Donation Gives

LÖSEV’s own communications are unusually candid about what money does when it reaches the foundation. “Every kuruş and every mouthful of your donations finds its place and, most importantly, gives life,” its officials say. That formulation — a kuruş, a mouthful, a life — is not sentiment. It describes a chain of causality that runs from a bank transfer in London through a logistical operation in Ankara to a meal in the home of a child whose immune system has been stripped bare by chemotherapy, and whose family has no income because both parents are at the hospital.

Twenty-seven years is a long time to sustain that chain. The fact that LÖSEV has done so — and that it has done so while growing its network to more than 118,000 registered patients — is the clearest evidence of what sustained, transparent, patient-centred civil society can achieve in a country still building the infrastructure of trust. For donors in Britain looking for a cause with deep roots, clear outcomes and a direct connection to the Turkish communities among them, it is an organisation worth knowing.

For information or to donate: losev.org.tr  ·  Tel (from UK): 00 90 312 447 06 60  ·  LÖSEV holds public-benefit foundation status in Turkey.