High School Senior Champions Rare Cancer Awareness, Raises Nearly $5,000 for RCRF
Harper at her Common Basket presentation on November 3, 2025.
RCRF would like to extend our sincere appreciation to Harper Stevenson-Shimek, a high school senior from Minnesota who recently raised nearly $5,000 from her fellow students for our organization.
The fundraiser was part of her high school’s ‘Common Basket’ program, where students create a presentation on a nonprofit organization they are passionate about and gather donations. The goal of the program is to encourage students to be responsible stewards of their money and to donate to good causes.
According to Harper, this donation amount was one of the largest that any one cause has received in her school’s ‘Common Basket’ program history.
”This is a super strong connection for me [to RCRF] and being able to share my personal story was really powerful for people,” she said.
In the summer of 2023, her late father, Brendan Stevenson, was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. In the U.S., gallbladder cancer has an incidence of only 1–2 cases per 100,000 people per year.
He began a chemotherapy regimen and then had an unsuccessful surgery in December of that year, at which point his care team shifted their priorities from curing the disease to treating its progression. He continued to exhaust different chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy regimens, and even participated in a clinical trial through UW Madison.
In June of 2024, their family was heartbreakingly told that they were running out of options, and they chose to stop treatment and focus on time together instead. Harper’s father passed away that August.
“I think about my dad every day and I always will,”she said. “My thought is ‘what can I do that can help?’ and I know my dad is looking down on me and this is what he would want,” she said.
Harper and her late father, Brendan Stevenson, on a family trip to Alaska in the summer of 2024.
She emphasizes that she is happy to contribute to RCRF’s commitment to providing resources to rare cancer patients and researchers.
