Eleanor Seigel is raising funds for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation.

A childhood cancer survivor herself, Fredonia Elementary School third-grader Eleanor Seigel loves to help other kids afflicted with the terrible disease.

Now, she’s giving every hair on her head to the effort.

Eleanor has been growing out her hair with the intention to donate it for wigs for other pediatric cancer patients. She is also raising money for pediatric cancer research. These two goals will come together June 26 as she chops more than a foot of hair off of her head.

Currently in remission from leukemia diagnosed in 2012 when she was a baby,

Eleanor, 9, raises funds for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, the nation’s largest private provider of grants for childhood cancer care and research. Her fund is called Ella’s Love Heals A.L.L. She and her family have raised more than $28,000 over the last five years for the foundation.

The website for Eleanor’s hair effort is https://www.stbaldricks.org/events/EllasLoveHealsALL2021. It seeks fundraisers and donors to join her effort. “We will record live her marvelous hair cut here in Fredonia and then share it with you all,” it promises.

The girl’s mother, Nicole McPherson, said her leukemia fight inspired the family to get involved in fundraising for childhood cancer research.

When Eleanor was diagnosed, “there really wasn’t much chemotherapies for her or many new drugs that had come out,” McPherson said. Because of a lack of treatment geared to children, “she got medicines that were dangerous for her. … That fueled us to say, ‘there needs to be more research.'”

Eleanor has also designed socks for Resilience Gives, a project that also raised money for her fund. She donated the socks to kids fighting cancer at Roswell Park in Buffalo. In addition, McPherson said she helped put together a food donation to a local church for the needy over the holidays.

“She is her own big superstar,” McPherson said. “She’s so sunny, always upbeat and trying to help people out.”

The main website for Ella’s Love Heals ALL calls her “a vibrant, adventurous, and silly eight year-old with a huge, sunny personality,” in a description written by McPherson and her husband, Andrew Siegel.

She “plays baseball, is in love with her gymnastics class and enjoys learning new music on her cello. She is always singing, dancing, whistling and sharing stories. … She loves her big brother, she looks up to him, and enjoys playing and being super silly with him. Ella loves to paint and draw, she loves her books and her kitty cats. She is absorbing the world around her and embracing all things beautiful.”

However, there is a dark side: “Because of the treatments Ella had while her body and brain were starting to develop, she will face all kinds of life-long side effects, including life-threatening ones.”

The girl’s hair cutting fundraiser has a goal of $10,000. As of earlier this week, it had raised $1,161.