FIGHT CANCER WITH FORD (FCWF) is my personal grassroots crusade to FIND A CURE for cancer. In the past, I raised money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society but now the fight became more personal for me when I had a recurrence of my Prostate Cancer in 2014. You can read my full story here. My hope is that FCWF will eventually become a larger grassroots movement but for now I want to keep it simple so that monies donated will go directly to the mission instead of supporting a large administrative financial burden like one sees with national organizations. There are many good causes out there and many high-profile organizations collecting money for them. Most of these organizations do great work and collect a lot of money but unfortunately, because of their size and scope the national organizations use up 20% of monies donated (on average) for their cost of operations. For someone like me who puts a lot of effort into raising money for a purpose (riding my bike 100 miles for instance), it can be somewhat disappointing to know the last twenty miles I ride actually pays for administrative fees. I want the whole 100 miles to go toward patient care and research! In addition, monies given to national organizations get diluted by supporting multiple causes, projects and organizations. This is generally all good but donors to the large organizations cannot be guaranteed their money will actually be spent how the donor intended. These factors led me to find a mechanism whereby I could raise money for a specific cause and inject those funds directly into the mainline of the mission. Hence, I created FCWF where more than 98% of the monies donated will go directly into patient care and research to FIND A CURE! It would be 100% if it weren’t for credit card fees for online donations.
The second part of the equation is to have somewhere to inject the funds once donated that directly fulfills the purpose as efficiently as possible. For 2016, FCWF’s mission is to FIND A CURE for Prostate Cancer. There are many research programs I could’ve connected with and after reviewing them, I decided to collaborate with the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Prostate and Urologic Cancers (IPUC). While my personal experience as a patient with the University influenced my choice, I feel Minnesota is fortunate to have a top-notch program like this. As a physician and a patient, I have no problem recommending them as a first or second opinion to others who approach me. Therefore, FCWF formed a collaboration with IPUC so that funds are donated directly to their program and specifically to their fund at the University so that all monies donated to FCWF will go to patient care, research and to FIND A CURE. Read more about IPUC here.