The last students at Westport High School to have a clear picture of Jane in their heads will graduate within the next two weeks. The last group to have her in class graduated a year ago. The last group to know about her through me will graduate in a year.

There were plans to dedicate a memorial garden in her memory in a courtyard of the school. I don’t know if those plans ever bore full fruit. If they did–or do–there will be a plaque of some kind there with her name on it. But within four or five years, almost no one will know anything more than the name–and most of those who do will be the handful of teachers that worked with her toward the end of her career.

Her students will remember her. Each of them will carry the spirit she gave them throughout their lives. Pieces of the attitudes she tried to instill in them–respect for others, respect for the pursuit of knowledge, the idea that no task is impossible no matter how difficult it may seem at first, that women can do science–or anything else –will find their way into those students’ children and grandchildren.

But if Walking with Jane is to accomplish the final goal of her life–the defeat of neuroendocrine cancer and carcinoid syndrome–then we cannot remain tied to Westport High School in Westport, Massachusetts. We have to find ways to grow beyond putting on local suppers and yard sales.

And I don’t know how to do that–at least not yet.

We had our first official board meeting last night of Walking with Jane, Inc. We talked about the point of diminishing returns, about the fact that students in Westport will soon not have even an institutional memory of her, about the demands on people’s’ time created by family, by career, by other fundraising programs. We agreed we will need more people to carry this mission forward. We agreed we have to figure out how to grow beyond the South Coast of Massachusetts. We agreed that we need to figure out how to get to the big leagues inhabited by the likes of the Komen Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

And we agreed that while we do not know now how to do that, we need to figure out how–and the key to that is looking at how the heavy-hitters got there.

Some will argue there is no need for that–that there are other groups that are better equipped to get there than we are–that this is a minor cancer that kills only slowly–that there are other things in the world with greater priority.

Only the third statement may actually carry a grain of truth in it–but to the people consigned to a slow death because of NET, there is likely not a lot that is a higher priority. Global warming won’t matter much to you if you are dead.

So our job needs to be more than building a better bake sale. We need to figure out how to grow this effort the way one would grow a business. The goal is clear enough. How to get there is the next key.