Two people with freshly shaved heads sit in green barber capes, holding up a large green banner lettered Conquer Kids' Cancer above the St. Baldrick's Foundation name and mark. Others in matching printed T-shirts stand behind them on the grass, outside a school building whose windows are covered in small coloured paper notes. — Holding up the banner after two of us had our heads shaved.

Students Putting an End to Cancer

A St. Baldrick's event is a head-shaving fundraiser. Volunteers sign up to be shaved and collect pledges in the weeks before; on the day they sit for the clippers in front of whoever comes to watch, in solidarity with children who lose their hair to cancer treatment, and the money goes to research into childhood cancers.

Outdoors under a walkway canopy, a seated person in a green barber cape has their head shaved by someone in a green St. Baldrick's Foundation T-shirt, while a crowd of students, several of them in face masks, watches and films on phones. — The clippers, and most of the school watching.

A visit to a children's hospital is arranged with the hospital in advance rather than walked into. Its child life team, the staff who look after the non-medical side of a child's stay, say what the wards can take and when, and anyone with so much as a cold stays home.

Two students standing on the pavement outside an entrance signed Cohen Children's Medical Center, Northwell Health. One holds a hand-lettered poster reading 'Students Putting An End to Cancer'; the other carries two wrapped gift boxes. — Outside Cohen Children's, with the sign and the gifts.

Two students standing on either side of a hand-made tri-fold display board headed 'SPEC - Students Putting an End to Cancer', set up on a folding table on grass, with other stalls and a school building behind them. — Our table at the club fair, with the board we made for it.

A long row of students standing shoulder to shoulder behind a folding table laid with wrapped baked goods, in a school lobby hung with a line of small national flags and lit by tall windows. — Behind the baked goods table in the lobby.