Cancer PALS Mentor Program
The Cancer PALS Mentor Program is designed to provide compassionate peer connection, encouragement, and shared understanding for individuals and families impacted by cancer.
Cancer can be isolating. A mentor can help someone feel heard, supported, and less alone by offering encouragement rooted in lived experience, caregiving experience, professional knowledge, or trained community service.
Program purpose
The mentor program exists to:
- Reduce feelings of isolation
- Offer emotional encouragement
- Promote hope and connection
- Support empowerment through shared experience
- Help patients, survivors, caregivers, and families feel seen and understood
- Strengthen community support throughout the cancer journey
Mentorship is intended to complement professional services — not replace medical care, counseling, legal support, financial guidance, or crisis intervention.
What mentors do
Mentors may provide:
- Peer encouragement
- Compassionate listening
- Shared understanding
- Caregiver or survivor perspective
- Supportive check-ins
- Encouragement to seek appropriate professional resources when needed
- Connection to Cancer PALS leadership when concerns or needs arise
Mentors do not promise outcomes, interpret medical information, recommend treatment decisions, or provide professional services outside an approved role.
Who can become a mentor
Mentors may include:
- Cancer survivors
- Caregivers
- Healthcare professionals
- Trained community volunteers
- People with relevant lived or professional experience
Mentors should demonstrate emotional maturity, empathy, reliability, respectful communication, and the ability to maintain healthy boundaries.
Depending on the role, mentors may be asked to complete orientation, training, screening, references, background checks, or other requirements before being matched.
How matching works
Cancer PALS works to make mentor connections thoughtfully. When possible, matches may consider:
- Participant preferences
- Diagnosis or treatment relevance
- Survivorship stage
- Caregiver role
- Age or life-stage considerations
- Communication style
- Availability
- Shared experience or support needs
If a match is not comfortable or effective, participants may request a different connection. Cancer PALS may also pause, modify, or discontinue a mentorship relationship to protect safety, boundaries, or program quality.
Mentor boundaries
Mentors are not licensed counselors, therapists, healthcare providers, legal advisors, or financial advisors unless separately credentialed and specifically authorized by Cancer PALS to serve in that professional role.
Mentors should not:
- Provide medical advice or treatment recommendations
- Interpret medical results
- Discourage professional care
- Provide legal, financial, or mental health advice
- Create dependency-based relationships
- Accept substantial gifts or financial entanglements
- Share confidential information without appropriate permission or safety need
Healthy boundaries protect mentors, participants, and the mission of Cancer PALS.
Safety and crisis concerns
If a participant expresses suicidal thoughts, threats of self-harm, abuse concerns, severe emotional distress, medical emergencies, threats toward others, or other urgent safety concerns, mentors should contact Cancer PALS leadership and appropriate emergency or crisis resources.
Mentors should not attempt to manage crisis situations beyond their training or role.
Interested in mentorship?
- If you would like to become a mentor, contact Cancer PALS.
- If you would like to request a mentor connection, visit Get Help or email CancerPALSFoundation@gmail.com.