When I was a little girl, my Mom was a neighbourhood activist. She connected with people from all over our neighbourhood and worked to change traffic patterns. My mom worked with a team who mobilized the community with teams and block captains. They fought City Hall and won! Our neighbourhood streets were slated to become arterial thoroughfares, but because people took action, our neighbourhood is now one of the most desirable and most walkable areas in the city.

It seems advocacy is in my DNA!

Advocacy brings me joy. I love connecting with people and doing meaningful work. Advocacy can include amazing things like working with teams of people to decide which international research proposals gets funded (prepping for this tomorrow), or giving input into Canada’s cancer research priorities for the next five years (online meeting tomorrow). It’s important that people affected by lung cancer are represented in these kinds of conversations.

I’m keeping quite busy with my regular lung cancer advocacy work. I have a number of regular meetings and ongoing projects, and there are also frequent additional opportunities to learn, connect, and/or serve in some way.

On Saturday, for example, I worked with someone from an organization I’m connected with to shoot a brief video via zoom for an upcoming conference, participated in a great zoom team meeting for The White Ribbon Project, and had a prep meeting via zoom for a speaking engagement that I was invited to do through my volunteer work with the Canadian Cancer Trials Group. I’ll be team speaking with a dedicated cancer advocate and an oncologist about clinical trials at a big online meeting in May.

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time connecting with lung cancer advocates from across North America, which I really enjoy. Advocacy is accomplished through relationships and teamwork, a lesson I learned as a little girl from my Mom and have seen repeated over and over again. I am grateful to get to know so many amazing people! This is one of the silver linings of lung cancer.

Advocacy work lights my fire!

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