For children, teens, and families facing serious health challenges
Keep them connected to the life they love.
A serious health challenge can change a family’s world overnight, pulling a child away from friends, school, and familiar routines. SurroundMe brings their circle of support together to keep the child part of everyday moments, step in with practical help, and learn how to make it count.
Our mission
Our mission and vision
Mission
SurroundMe, Inc. keeps children and teens facing serious health challenges connected to friends, family, school, and everyday life, and serves the parents and siblings who stand beside them. We equip each family’s circle of support with specific ways to help and the guidance to make that help count, in practical needs and everyday moments alike, always at no cost to families.
Vision
A world where every child and teen facing a serious health challenge stays connected to the life they love.
SurroundMe welcomes children, teens, families, and supporters of all backgrounds, identities, and family structures.
Why it matters
Where treatment meets everyday life.
SurroundMe is a private, secure ecosystem built for the whole family. A funny message, a photo from lunch, a livestream of Saturday’s soccer game: small moments like these keep a child in the middle of things through treatment and recovery.
The app
The app we are building
The SurroundMe app is private and free for surrounded families. Most tools for families facing illness focus on medical updates and scheduling help. SurroundMe handles these while also putting the child’s everyday life at the center.
Home
Family and friends fill a private feed with photos, videos, and messages, with real-time reactions.
Support
Children and families post specific requests to their circle with a set timeframe, like livestreaming a soccer game, picking up a sibling from school, or bringing a meal to the hospital. Anyone in the circle can take it on.
Health updates
Parents can share updates when they choose, or let everyone know they’re not ready yet.
Learning center
Guidance for children, siblings, parents, and supporters on how to help well, like offering something specific instead of asking, “What can I do to help?”
SurroundMe is about connection and practical support. It doesn’t provide medical advice or care.
What guides us
- Connection comes first.
- Families choose what to share, including whether to share health information at all.
- Support should lighten the family’s load.
- Privacy and safety are built in from the start.
- Designed for every member of the circle: children, teens, parents, siblings, and supporters.
Who we are
Built by a pediatrician and a parent.
SurroundMe was founded by Dr. Michael Jacobson, a primary care pediatrician in San Diego for more than two decades. He is board certified in general pediatrics and clinical informatics, and serves as chief digital officer of a large pediatric primary care group.
Michael has spent his career caring for children and families, including through serious health challenges. He has also lived it as a parent: his daughter, Lily, was hospitalized several times in her first year of life. SurroundMe brings both perspectives together, so the people who love a child know how to help.
Where we are
We’re building SurroundMe now.
We’re testing the first version on iPhone with a small group of families before opening a wider pilot. Android and a web version are planned.
Get involved
SurroundMe is just getting started, and there are many ways to help.
Everyone
Share SurroundMe with someone who should know about it.
Donate
Support SurroundMe
SurroundMe is free for every surrounded family, with every feature and no limits, always. That means the child facing a serious illness at the center of the circle, their parents, their siblings and one family organizer.
Supporters (friends, relatives and everyone else in the circle) can use every feature free too, at full quality. Free supporter accounts include a set amount of photo and video storage and call and livestream minutes. A paid option for more is coming.
Your donation keeps SurroundMe free for surrounded families, so no family ever has to pay to stay surrounded.
Questions about giving? info@surroundme.org
SurroundMe, Inc. is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation. Its application for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status is pending with the IRS.