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Until a devastating cancer diagnosis upended their lives, Emily Miller and Patrick DeNeale, both MBA 01, shared a love story filled with excitement and wanderlust. They fell for each other at Haas, bonding over Cold War-era movies, World War II history, and a love of travel. After graduation, they moved to South Korea for jobs at Samsung. Later, they married in Prague and traveled throughout Asia and Russia.
“Life with Patrick was an adventure,” Miller says. Eventually, they bought a home in the Bay Area and had twin daughters in 2011.
When DeNeale was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, they didn’t know, of course, that he had just over two years left. Doctors were initially optimistic about his prognosis as he began chemotherapy. Miller and DeNeale stayed positive and focused on helping their 8-year-olds, Bodie and Lucy, cope. Miller contacted a friend who’d lost his wife to cancer, and he sang the praises of Camp Kesem.
Kesem is a nationwide nonprofit that provides free, year-round support to children aged 6 to 18 who have a parent or guardian with cancer. Led by college student volunteers, its primary program is Camp Kesem, a safe and supportive summer camp held at 117 locations nationwide. Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Kesem offers a fun-filled week where kids are surrounded by peers who understand and mentors who care.
DeNeale and Miller loved the idea, especially Miller, who’d been both a camper and camp counselor. But the girls had to wait until summer 2022, when COVID restrictions were lifted, to attend Kesem’s campsite in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
By then, their dad was no longer alive. Despite arduous rounds of chemotherapy followed by two experimental stem cell treatments, DeNeale died on Jan. 9, 2022. Miller, along with Bodie and Lucy, age 11 by that summer, were still settling into grief and unsure how camp would affect them. It turned out to be an important part of the family’s mourning. In fact, the girls benefited so much from camp that they’ve returned every year since. “It’s become a very meaningful place for them—just to be able to be themselves and not have to talk to people in coded terms,” Miller says.
Sometimes, members of the Haas alumni family find each other in unlikely ways. What Miller didn’t initially know was that Kesem was founded by Iris Wedeking, MBA 08. The two had never met before this article, but their lives converged all the same—the ripples of one’s passion project supporting the other in a time of stark grief.
Setting up camp
Like Miller, Wedeking was a frequent camper as a child, then a camp counselor in high school and college. She enjoyed working with kids with cancer and special needs. “Early on I discovered the magical power of the summer camp experience to transform the lives of children—and the counselors,” she says. “It was such an empowering feeling to know I could make a difference in that way.”
After graduating from Tufts, she took a job at Stanford with Hillel, the campus organization for Jewish students, engaging them in community service activities. She pitched the idea for Camp Kesem to her boss. It would enrich and empower the campers and develop the college-aged camp counselors’ leadership skills. Her boss approved the project, but Wedeking and the Stanford students had to raise all the funding.
Kesem means magic in Hebrew, and over the next nine months, Wedeking and the students formed committees to create and fund a transformational week for kids facing challenging circumstances at home. They found a camp facility to rent in Glen Ellen, California, and the first Camp Kesem opened in June 2001 with 37 children and 24 counselors.
Going national
After Kesem’s first two summers, word spread. Students at other universities called Wedeking wanting to start a Kesem chapter at their schools.
So Wedeking took the program national, starting with chapters at Notre Dame and Duke. To date, Kesem has supported over 90,000 young people and plans to expand the number of children they serve annually by 50% over the next three years. While summer camp remains its core offering, Kesem has programs and services for families all year.
Wedeking says the nonprofit’s secret sauce is empowering volunteer college students—over 24,000 to date—to channel their passions, energy, and skills to organize every aspect of Camp Kesem: fundraising, planning activities, and recruiting campers and counselors. The camp has always been free and welcoming to kids and teens whose parents are in treatment, in remission, or who have passed away. Cancer’s impact, however felt, is the common denominator.
Initially, a few parents wondered if this inclusiveness could be detrimental. For instance, would a child whose parent had died be upset meeting a peer with a parent in remission? Wedeking says they found the opposite to be true. She tells the story of a girl at camp whose mother had breast cancer. She met a boy whose father had died, yet he was laughing and having fun. The girl later told her mother, “Mommy, it’s OK if you die because you’ll always be in my heart.” She’d seen that even if the worst thing happened, she could still feel joy.
Forming bonds
It’s a few hours’ ride from UC Berkeley, where parents can drop off their kids, to the Nevada City, California, camp rented by the university’s Kesem chapter. Many campers make the trip on a Kesem bus, often sitting next to strangers—although they all know they have something difficult in common.
Situated among towering redwoods that skirt Lake Vera, the camp offers rustic comfort and quintessential activities, like archery and crafts, and modern additions: a zip line and wiffleball diamond. It’s the perfect setting to let go.
“After all we’ve been through, camp lets me be a kid again and depend on others,” says Bodie DeNeale, now 15. “I’m not forced to depend on myself.”
Each camp typically has two nurses and one mental health professional. Many of the counselors were Kesem campers themselves.
“When you’re going through your experience, you feel like you’re alone or you can’t tell anybody,” says Lucy DeNeale. “But you go there and you don’t have to tell anybody, but they know, and you have a community. You can not talk about it, or you can talk about it. And people will still accept you.”
A continuing mission
Wedeking, who gave her heart and soul to Kesem for six years, stepped down as CEO in 2006 and chose a Haas MBA as her next chapter. She’s now the founder and CEO of iDentical, which uses 3D printing to make drill-free dental implants, expanding access to patients worldwide. But she continues to sit on Kesem’s national board of directors, ensuring the nonprofit fulfills its mission of creating a community for the children of cancer patients.
It’s the succor Miller and her daughters needed. “The business side of my brain is fascinated by how Iris has built this organization,” Miller says. “But the personal side, because I’ve been touched by it, just feels awe.”
That’s proof of the far-reaching and supportive power of the Haas Alumni Network, even when least expected.
Header image: Camp Kesem’s “Messy Day” is a signature activity where campers and counselors let go of stress using paint, shaving cream, and water.
A fitting memorial
Emily Miller’s story is rife with Haas connections. In addition to falling in love at Haas, she also reconnected there with one of her closest childhood friends, Whitney Hischier, MBA 01. The two had lost touch after high school but wound up in the same MBA cohort.
Years later, when her husband’s cancer prognosis became terminal, Hischier and Miller brainstormed ways to keep Patrick DeNeale’s spirit alive. In addition to being well-traveled, DeNeale loved art, was a robotics engineer, and had taught himself Chinese.
“We thought about creating a scholarship at Haas to highlight some of the traits he had,” Hischier says.
The result was the Patrick DeNeale Renaissance Fellowship, funded by a core group of donors that Hischier and Miller assembled. The first award was given in 2023, to a second-year MBA student hoping to pursue a novel career direction, and will be given annually until 2027. Miller and Hischier have lunch with each new recipient. “It’s a nice way to meet the next generation of MBA grads,” Hischier says.
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