Happy Anniversary! Or not….

When a special fundraising event occurs, we celebrate it by sharing the news with anyone who will read or listen about it.  The subject gets dicey when you have an anniversary that ends in a 5, or a 0, and the reason for the special event is to fund something that everyone wants to go away – like a disease.

It is understandable that donors can get angry when a special event raising money for a disease, or cause, is still happening five, 10 or 20 years later.  Is there a conspiracy with the funds?  Has the cure been found and the money pipeline is too lucrative to shut off?

Gotta find the cause to find a cure.  Why is it taking so long?  How much money needs to be funneled into research before answers can be provided?  If you have ever spent time in a research lab, then you know that a fractional itty-bitty percentage of tests make it out of the beaker-and-test-tube-phase before they can be tested on animals.  A fractional itty-bitty percentage of the tests made on animals make it into a human drug trial. 

The clinical research trials on humans take several years before it can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for marketing.   Nobody wants to celebrate something that should have been resolved years ago.   Nobody wants to take a drug that has been rushed through the clinical trials process to find that it will be recalled 10 years later and they only people getting ‘better’ are the class-action lawyers that are making millions off the pharma companies.  We’ve all seen the commercials.    Research is a process.  A long one.  And it needs your support.

Having said that, I read an article by Meghan Telpner on HuffPo about the money train.

One of my major pet peeves is when a company spends more on the marketing and packaging of their “pink product” than the total donation given to the benefitting organization.   Even more annoying is the when these companies just say “research” without naming the organization, researcher, or foundation.

Check out my LINKS tab to see the websites you can use as a resource to check out the financials and grades of some charities you may be thinking of supporting.   If you really want to financially help an organization or foundation, then writing a check directly to that non-profit would make more of an impact than buying some self-serving, shameful crap.