NETs.
That is largely how I have spent the last three days. Friday, I pushed 225 pieces of mail out the door. Saturday, I walked 14.5 miles in the morning to train for the too-rapidly approaching Marathon Walk, then put out another 300 pieces of mail before I went to bed. This morning I put in five miles and sent another 250 pieces of mail.
But with that effort I have only the electronic mailings done. I still have about 500 envelopes to address and stuff next week for people for whom I have only physical addresses. I also have my training to continue, a poster to design, and a potential benefit concert to piece together for October–not to mention our annual post-Relay get together. Or the daily research. Or the daily writing of this blog.
If that all sounds a bit overwhelming, it is.
NETs Too small
The problem is there are too few people working full-time on raising money for NET. I am not sure there are a dozen people in the country really working this end of the thing. There is a reason funding for NET lags behind many other cancers. This weekend is the Komen three-day, 60 mile trek in the Boston area. Besides the people marching and the volunteers, that play is backed by a significant-size professional backbone. They will raise millions.
Next week is the Pan Mass Challenge. That bike run from the western Massachusetts border to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod has a goal this year of $36 million. Caring for Carcinoid, our Walk partner, has a team in that event that will likely raise over $100,000 for NET research at Dana-Farber. Our combined Caring for Carcinoid Walking with Jane team has a goal for the Marathon Walk of $25,000. Last year Caring for Carcinoid’s team raised just over $35,000 in the Marathon Walk. The Walk, as a whole, raised over $7 million, all of which went to research into various cancers.
Piggyback NET
Even if we could get every group working on NET cancer and carcinoid tumor funding into the same geographic area to work on a single fundraiser the size of the Marathon Walk or the Komen 3-Day, we simply would not have enough people to pull it off. Instead, we piggyback on other, larger fundraisers run by other groups who have the resources to pull off something big. This generates what, for us, is significant money. There are two groups doing the Marathon Walk with NET as their focus: Kulke’s Krewe and our combination CFCF/WWJ team. Between us, if they reach their goal and we reach the goal I have privately set in my mind for our group, we may raise close to $150,000 this year.
That would be great. But it still will be a long way from the amount of money we really need to raise if we are going to kill this disease before I am too old to walk.
I have no easy solution to the funding problem. All I can do is send out emails and letters and hope we eventually get to the point we can hold our own big events that people will actually take part in.
