for the families who call it 65 roses
We make every breath
a little easier.
We're Max and Rex, two brothers from Redwood High. We bring free Mila air purifiers to Bay Area families living with cystic fibrosis, and set them up ourselves.
Request a purifier
Families Mila has helped across the country. Ours start this month.
Our goal
A purifier in the home of every Bay Area family living with cystic fibrosis.
Dirty air is bad for every kid, and even harder on kids with CF. Studies show air pollution increases the risk of flare-ups by 21% while leaving lungs more vulnerable to Pseudomonas and MRSA.
We can't fix the air outside, and there's no cure for cystic fibrosis yet. But we can help with the air at home.
How it works
Tell us your story. Each month, we pick a family and bring one over.
Tell us about the one you love.
There's no right way to write it.
We read every word and reply to every one.
We're just two high schoolers. We pick the stories that move us most and where we can have the most impact.
We install it for you.
We bring it to your door, set it up in the best room, and show you how to get the most out of it.
We'll drive pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area.
San Jose to Santa Rosa, Half Moon Bay to Walnut Creek. Not sure if you're close enough? Ask anyway. We'll try.
It's a purifier, not a treatment. We're two brothers doing this around school, so it's about one family a month. We can't say yes to everyone, but we answer everyone.
Why we're doing this
We were born in Shanghai, where clean air wasn't a given.
We grew up wearing masks on our walk to preschool, and when Rex turned two, poor air kept him sick all the time. (I'm pretty sure that's why he was so grumpy back then.) To help us, our dad built Mila—a small personal project that somehow grew into 100,000 homes.
Then the CF community found us. A mom named Jamie wrote in after her son Mason was diagnosed, and then came another letter, and another—until nearly two hundred families had reached out.
When our dad shared those letters at dinner, it hit us: he built Mila to protect us, so we wanted to do the exact same thing for them.
65 roses
Kids with CF call it 65 roses.
In 1965, a four-year-old named Richard listened to his mother calling around to raise money for CF research. Then he told her he knew what she was working for: 65 roses. Families have called it that ever since.
The full story, from the CF Foundation →