Past as Prelude
I really feel overwhelmed by the task of fighting NET cancer lately. I look at how far Walking with Jane has come in a little less than two years and I am enormously pleased. Then I look at how far we have to go–and I am terrified.
…it means potentially saving a quarter of a million people…
Last year we generated just over $100,000 for cancer research–two-thirds of it for research into NET cancer. But to get there we tried every method we could think of: yard sales, dinners, walks, direct mail campaigns, t-shirts, buttons, jewelry–we even timed donations to take advantage of two-for-one matches whenever we could.
What $100,000 took
I went through three pairs of sneakers and likely walked and ran over 300 miles between training and actual walks and runs. And I wrote constantly, drafting posts for this blog, letters to potential donors and businesses I thought I might be able to entice into sponsorship deals, and notes to potential walkers and team members. And I read everything I could find about leveraging social media, as well as about NET cancer and cancer in general.
I don’t know anyone with deep pockets…
I updated this website as often as I could–which required more reading and more writing and more thinking. And when it seemed I was out of both energy and ideas, someone would come through the door with another way to try to get NET cancer on the map and well-funded–and I would kick in another slew of 16 hour days.
Making a NET cancer difference
People tell me all that effort has made a difference. They tell me they come out of meetings with me invigorated and recharged. They tell me the money we raised has leveraged other money I know nothing about that has led to more research and more hope for NET cancer patients.
$100,000 seems an insignificant amount.
But I look at that $100,000 and feel like the friend who just spent three days chopping up box tops to raise $89 for a rural school system. When we need tens of millions of dollars to make even a good start on finding a cure for NET cancer, that $100,000 seems an insignificant amount. It may be more than we had to start with, but I worry about the size of the effort it took to get us even that amount.
The NET cancer doubling cube
And we have pledged to double that amount in 2013, double that amount in 2014, double that amount in 2015, double that amount in 2016, and double that amount in 2017. In 2017 we hope to raise $3.2 million–roughly what was raised total by everyone in NET cancer foundations two years ago. In the seven years following Jane’s death the goal is to generate over $6.4 million.
I went through three pairs of sneakers…
When I look at those numbers, I get scared. I’m a retired school teacher from a rural school system who never made $70,000 in a single year. My former students are, for the most part, themselves, school teachers and newspaper reporters and nurses and other folks whose means are stretched to cover the needs of their families. I don’t know anyone with deep pockets–the kinds of people who write a $10,000 check as easily as they breathe. I have no business thinking about those kinds of numbers.
Saving NET cancer lives
But I do think about them. I think about them because the only way to unravel the mystery that is NET cancer is to find those kinds of resources–and to inspire others to find those kinds of resources as well. And if we can do that, then that $3.2 million figure inspires another $9 or $10 million raised by the other groups involved in this fight. We’ll be able to explore many avenues of NET cancer research instead of the one or two we can afford to pursue now–and that will mean the time to a NET cancer cure decreases from 25 or 30 years down to ten.
I am terrified.
More importantly, it means potentially saving a quarter of a million people in the US from the NET cancer death Jane endured. Afraid as I am of those big dollar amounts, those lives matter far more.
