She created YES DAY for children in crisis. Then her godson needed it.
Jodi Sonenshine had imagined this moment hundreds of times.
An unsuspecting child would arrive. Friends would be waiting. There would be cheers and tears and, for a little while, a family overwhelmed by medical appointments and life-and-death worries would get to think about something else.
This was why, a few months ago, she started YES DAY, an organization built around creating moments of joy for children and young adults facing medical challenges.
She just never imagined one of the first children standing in the middle of all that joy would be her godson, Jonah.
Yet there she was Friday afternoon, arm-in-arm with Jonah Blick’s mother, Randi, watching hundreds of friends and neighbors shower the 14-year-old with love.
The look on Jonah’s face as he walked through a roaring gauntlet of friends, family and neighbors was sheer surprise.
It felt like half of Dunwoody had crowded into a church parking lot to send off a kid whose life had changed in an instant.
“Cancer is messing with the wrong family,” Jodi said.
The word ‘yes’
A disclosure is important here: The Blicks and Sonenshines are personal friends. We’ve known each other for decades.
That means I’ve had a close-up view of a friendship that is difficult to put to words. Because calling Jodi and Randi best friends doesn’t quite cover it.
Jodi and Randi are stitched into the very fabric of each other’s lives. They met at the University of Florida. They raised their children together. They call each other “framily.” They consider each other soulmates. Jodi is Jonah’s godmother, but he might as well consider her another mom.
So when Jodi talks about helping children, Jonah was never some abstract example. He is as much a part of her family as her two children.
Jodi did not set out to start a charity. She started in advertising. Then came children, divorce and the desire to build a different kind of life.
She wound up directing the summer camp program at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. Later came Dream On 3, where she helped create unforgettable experiences for children facing serious illnesses.
That work taught her something. Sick children hear “no” all the time — that they can’t go to school or travel or play with friends. That their life can’t be what it was before.
She wanted to build something around an entirely different word.
Yes.
What would make this child happy? What would make this family forget, even for a little while, the incomprehensible struggles they were facing? What can we say yes to?
That became YES DAY.
Then came Aug. 8.
And suddenly those questions were no longer about somebody else’s child.
‘We are still standing’
Randi and her family were enjoying a Saturday at a lake house in North Georgia when Jonah suffered a massive seizure. Jodi rushed to the hospital to meet Randi and Jonah at the emergency room.
Hours earlier, he had been a teenager enjoying the final throes of summer.
A few days later came the diagnosis the family had dreaded: a rare and aggressive form of pediatric brain cancer.
There were two major surgeries, one in Atlanta and another in Boston. After the first, Jonah was home within days. A week later, he started his freshman year at Dunwoody High School.
The adults around him were struggling to comprehend how quickly everything had changed. Jonah just kept going. And something remarkable started happening around the Blicks.
Friends organized meals. They volunteered to walk their dog or do laundry or say nightly prayers. Messages poured in from people asking what they could do. An informal army emerged to handle the logistics of a crisis so Randi and her husband, Adam, could focus on their son.
Jodi helped put it all together. Her new charity was built around the idea that when life tells children no, somebody ought to find a way to say yes. Now she was putting that idea to work for a child she loved as her own.
Adam was confronting the same helplessness in his own way. The owner of a tech firm, he’s no political insider. But in the days after Jonah’s diagnosis, he and Randi met with Gov. Brian Kemp and his wife, Marty, in his Capitol office.
Adam did something in that room that was deeply out of character: He lobbied Georgia’s most powerful politician to do more to support children and families confronting cancer.
His reasoning was simple. If Jonah could wage war against cancer, his father could at least summon the nerve to badger the governor.
Randi has struggled to find the words to describe how their community has come together around them.
“I have been trying to think of what I could possibly write to convey our family’s gratitude to this community and beyond but, I actually can’t do it,” she wrote to friends the other day.
“Please just know that the reason we are still standing is because of all of you.”
48 hours
Now, Jodi has another task.
Jonah is a lifelong Florida Gators fan. So before radiation treatment begins next week, YES DAY put together 48 hours of fun designed to have nothing to do with cancer.
She arranged a trip to Gainesville with five of his closest friends. More than 40 friends and relatives would become Team Jonah.
He would stay at Florida’s team hotel. Meet football players. Tour locker rooms. Go onto the field at the Swamp before the game. Watch Florida play Florida Atlantic from a fancy suite.
And there would be more surprises Jodi wasn’t about to disclose.
“Over the past month, Jonah has had to endure more than any child has had to,” Jodi told the crowd Friday. “For the next 48 hours there will be no mention of cancer, no talk about a diagnosis.”
For at least a few days, cancer didn’t get to dictate the schedule. Jodi did.
On Friday, she stood in a church parking lot directing all the chaos around her as hundreds awaited Jonah’s arrival.
A squad of police officers and firefighters scurried to help with the send-off. Atlanta Falcons cheerleaders and players showed up. Kids clustered everywhere, and even lifelong Georgia fans donned the closest attire they had to match Florida’s orange and blue.
“Many people here are just temporary Gator fans,” Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch said, “but they are permanent Jonah fans.”
Tom Bass, principal at Dunwoody High, marveled at the swirl of energy around him.
“This is what Dunwoody is,” he said. “We circle the wagons for people we love and care about.”
And then, Team Jonah was on its way.
Off to Gainesville. Off for a weekend when the questions wouldn’t be about pathology reports and radiation treatments, but football players and shopping trips and whatever Jodi dreamed of next.
Jodi started YES DAY because there are some things you simply cannot fix for a child.
Now she understands that lesson more than she ever wanted to.
She can’t tell her best friend that none of this happened.
She can’t tell her godson that he doesn’t have cancer.
She can’t say yes to the thing everyone who loves Jonah wants most: making his illness disappear.
So she is saying yes every other way she can.
“We can’t change your diagnosis,” Jodi said. “We can bring you joy.”
