Over the past four decades, owing largely to the interdisciplinary field of psychosocial oncology, there has been significant progress in how we understand and care for the psychological well-being of patients who have been diagnosed with cancer. The more than 600 evidence-based interventions documented to date (Moyer et al., 2009), and the current focus on patient-centred care (Kitson et al., 2013), suggests that attending to a patient’s emotional needs and psychosocial well-being is a widely recognized and indisputable part of cancer care. Yet, unmet emotional needs persist across Canada and there remains much room for improvement in terms of providing adequate emotional support at diagnosis and throughout treatment (Carlson et al., 2004;
Coronado, et al., 2017). This paper describes how one Canadian cancer centre cultivated a sense of compassion, connection, and community, individually and collectively, by integrating innovative meaning-making activities into cancer practice.