Ethics matter to me, so in the interest of full disclosure I need to explain some things about Walking with Jane and our affiliations with other charitable groups involved in raising money to solve the multiple riddles that make up cancer in general and NET in particular.
Walking with Jane was created after my wife died of NET/CS December 10, 2010. The basic idea was to create an organization to raise money and awareness for the supposedly rare form of cancer that killed her. That mission has grown somewhat in the months since as I came to realize that patients with the disease and the general public needed to be able to find up-to-date information and support on the disease as seamlessly as possible. It is not that other groups don’t do this. But I come out of a journalism background. I have spent a good chunk of my life figuring out how to explain to general audiences fairly complex issues in terms they can easily understand without losing the complexity in the process. It is a lot harder to do than it looks.
All the money to run Walking with Jane comes out of my pocket. We have no overhead. I buy the merchandise that is listed in the store. When you buy something there all the money–with the exception of what it costs me to ship it to you–goes to the Walking with Jane Relay for Life team’s donations to the American Cancer Society. Even what I paid for the merchandise goes to Relay. If you buy something from us locally–meaning you buy it at an event–you pay a lower price because I don’t have to send it to you.
If you see us at a flea market, I paid the fee out of my pocket. All the money we take in from the sale of that merchandise goes to our Relay team. That may change in the future. We may decide it makes more sense to donate that money to someone else. We may get to the point we are selling so much stuff that I can’t afford to buy everything we need. But for right now, that is how it works. And I will tell you if it changes.
The hosting fees for the website come out of my pocket.
The people who designed this website did it for free. The people who write the articles for the Press Kit and edit the copy do it for free.The people who designed the t-shirts and the other merchandise do it for free. They do it because they feel my wife and I had an impact on their lives.
The people on our board of directors do not make any money from it. We do not pay them. They were all close friends of Jane and do it to honor her memory.
In short, what we do here either I pay for or people volunteer to do.
Everything we raise goes to one of four organizations. Tomorrow I will talk about one of those organizations and how we came to be related to them. In subsequent days I will talk about the other three.
