Penn student getting a new honor for starting ‘For Love & Buttercup,’ a nonprofit that donates books to sick kids

Emily Bhatnagar, a University of Pennsylvania student who started a nonprofit to collect and donate books to children in hospitals, has gotten a lot of national recognition.

Bhatnagar, 21, started For Love & Buttercup to give books to children with cancer when she was 17, still in high school, and living with her family in Gaithersburg, Md.

She created the nonprofit to help manage the anxiety she was feeling after her father, Mike Bhatnagar, was diagnosed with Stage 4 thyroid cancer in October 2019, a few months before Emily turned 16.

Bhatnagar launched her book drive in July 2021, and by that December, she had donated 7,000 books. That’s when the Washington Post wrote a profile on her.

When she was 19, CNN honored Bhatnagar as a 2023 Young Wonder as part of its CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute.

The program noted she had given away 20,000 books, mostly from donations through an Amazon Wish List. Today, the Buttercup project has distributed over 25,000 books.

Now, there is another major award heading Bhatnagar’s way.

On March 15, the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, where her father is still undergoing treatment, will present Bhatnagar with the Margaret L. Hodges Leadership Award for her “can-do leadership spirit” at a gala at The Anthem in Washington.

Her father, who is currently being treated for small cancerous nodules in his lungs, is expected to accompany her on stage.

Bhatnagar was always shy and anxious at school as a young child and didn’t have many friends, she said. Books became her companions.

But as she helped take care of her father, her anxiety increased, and she developed other health issues of her own, including an eating disorder. She didn’t want to eat when her father could only eat through a feeding tube, she said. With medical treatment, she got better.

Throughout her last year of high school, Bhatnagar didn’t attend parties or the prom. Nor was she able to graduate with her school’s Class of 2022.

“I missed all my homecomings, all my proms. I didn’t go to a single football game,” she told The Inquirer.

She did graduate, but later in the year, after making up classes she had missed.

To deal with the anxiety — she was a caregiver, a student, and sometimes helped her mother with the family’s takeout restaurant, Monsoon Kitchens — she turned to her lifelong love of books as an escape.

“I had always loved books,” she said. “Books were very comforting and gave me a way to transport myself to a world that was very different from my reality.”

As her father gained strength, Bhatnagar began thinking about how much harder coping with cancer must be for children.

One day, it dawned on her to channel her anxiety into a project to share her love of books with children. She named it For Love & Buttercup, after one of her favorite flowers.

Her first request for book donations was through the neighborhood app Nextdoor. She was so surprised at all the boxes of books dropped off at her door that she expanded the book drive to serve children with other illnesses in addition to those with cancer.

Now, she gets books donated from all over the country.

After high school, Bhatnagar took a two-year gap before college to focus on helping her father.

She makes sure he has the food he needs for the feeding tube he uses since an emergency tracheotomy. She accompanies him to doctors’ appointments and picks up his prescriptions.

And she still helps out at the restaurant, making sure sales taxes and business licenses are in order.

All the while, she and her parents would drive boxes of books to children’s hospitals, at first, mainly in the Washington, Virginia, and Maryland area. She recently reached out to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to distribute books there too. Her brother Michael, 23, has also helped, driving her to collect donated books and to medical appointments with their father.

“I am really proud of her,” said her mother, Jyoti Bhatnagar. “She takes care of a lot of things.”

Last fall, Emily began studies at the University of Pennsylvania through a remote-learning education program at the school’s College of Liberal & Professional Studies.

She wants to focus on business and is enrolled in a bachelor of applied arts and sciences degree program where she is majoring in leadership and communications. She turned 21 shortly after the winter break.

“We did a campus tour last August or September, and I just loved the campus. It was so beautiful.“ She said her father was also excited because he once worked at Penn as a food services director.

Because she’s studying remotely, from Maryland, Bhatnagar sometimes imagines what it would be like to attend classes on campus. But she has no regrets.

“My dad is my best friend. I wouldn’t trade anything for the time I have with him,” she said.

Bhatnagar feels a special connection to Philadelphia. Maybe, she said, it’s because it was the first city where her parents lived after they married.

Her parents later moved to Chicago, where she and her older brother were born, before the family moved to Virginia, then to Maryland.

Once, when she was about 8 or 9, her family visited Philly from Maryland, and Bhatnagar said she was mesmerized by the city. She remembers the Reading Terminal Market and being fascinated by a man playing a saxophone on the street. “I really loved the ‘Love’ sign too,” she said.

“I was a very shy kid, and most cities were my biggest nightmare,” she said. “But Philly, for some reason, it felt like home.”