Our History

In 1984, while working in the marketing department at Air Canada, Jinnie Bradshaw, C.M., learned of the Corporate Angel Network in the Northeastern United States, which used corporate planes to get cancer patients to treatment. Jinnie was certain there was a need for such a service in Canada, but no similar service existed then.
 
Around the same time at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, volunteer Joan Rogers saw cancer patients from the east coast arriving for treatment after spending 15 to 20 hours on a bus. Joan knew that there had to be a better way.
 
Jinnie was passionate about the idea of creating a charity to help patients get to treatment quickly and easily and soon realized that the time commitment required to bring such an idea into reality was enormous. She resigned her full time work and devoted her efforts to getting the new Canadian charity off the ground. She recruited friends to help, professional colleagues to join the board, corporations to offer their aircraft for flights, and approached many others to financially support the idea.

During this critical time in 1985 and 1986, the stars aligned, and Jinnie and Joan’s paths intersected through mutual contacts at the Canadian Cancer Society. Joining together, these two innovative women became the co-founders of Mission Air Transportation Network (now Hope Air).

On a brisk November day, Hope Air arranged its first flight for a Canadian to get from their home to the hospital – a child from New Brunswick travelled to Toronto for cancer treatment. In that first year, the charity arranged 56 flights.

Since then, Hope Air has arranged more than 150,000 travel arrangments for Canadians in financial need travelling to vital medical care far from home.