Ready to start planning your NCSD 2025 celebration? Try one of these creative event themes:
On National Cancer Survivors Day®, Sunday, June 1, thousands of people around the world will gather to celebrate life after cancer. As you start planning your own community’s celebration, you may want to think about giving your event a theme.
Your event’s theme can be anything you want it to be – from side-splitting to heartwarming, playful to educational, or even location specific. Our recently updated NCSD event themes page is chockfull of creative theme ideas to help add a little spark to your NCSD 2025 Celebration of Life.
Here’s some “themespiration” to get you started:
There’s No Place Like Hope
You’re gonna be popular! Survivors, caregivers, and treatment staff – oh my! Delight guests with a Wizard of Oz or Wicked–themed Survivors Day event complete with a “yellow brick road” for guests to follow into the event space. Send out movie ticket invites and decorate in all pinks and greens. To correlate with Dorothy’s journey through OZ, consider allowing cancer survivors from your community to share the lessons they’ve learned along their cancer journeys.
Living in Full Bloom
Host a garden or floral-themed event. An ideal location would be your local botanical gardens or a garden on hospital grounds. Have survivors paint flowerpots or garden rocks, create floral arrangements, or construct a “tree of life” collage with survivors’ names and messages of hope on individual leaves. You can also plant trees or dedicate a garden to honor survivors. Give out flower seed packets as souvenirs.
Survivors are Magic
Host a magic-themed event for survivors. Invite a local magician to perform or have them give magic lessons. Include magic-themed food and drinks.
Survivors Rock
Music is the center of this event, and it doesn’t even have to be rock and roll. Include performances by local musicians, set up a karaoke stage or an interactive music station, or host a workshop on music therapy. The options are endless. An Elvis impersonator would really shake things up!
Savor the Sweet Life
All you need for this theme is ice cream. You can host a homemade ice cream contest, set up a create-your-own sundae bar, or cater in treats from a local scoop shop. A barbershop quartet would provide the cherry on top for this old-fashioned ice cream social.
