A fund has been set up by the family of a teenager who died from cancer to support other families with children who are receiving treatment for the disease.
Matthew’s Meals and Miles will raise money to be donated to the Children’s Cancer North charity, which will help with the costs of transport, meals, and accommodation for families visiting the Great North Children’s Hospital in Newcastle.
The initiative has been named after 18-year-old Matthew Adams from Tynemouth, who died last year from an ultra-rare and incurable cancer affecting his hormone-producing cells.
His mother Jane Hall said: “He would be very proud because he had that generous, kind nature.”
She said she wanted to launch the fund this week ahead of what would have been his 20th birthday.
“He didn’t like publicity, he wasn’t one for jumping up and down and going, ‘look at me’,” she said.
“But he really just wanted to go out and do good if he could.”
Her son, an air cadet who was hoping to study archaeology at university, was in his final year of A-levels when his condition quickly deteriorated.
Last May, he died from metastatic paraganglioma, which affects two in a million people and is even rarer in young people, two and a half years after being diagnosed.
