Until There Is A Cure: Our 2022 Impact Report

We hope you will be invigorated, inspired, and excited by all that Swifty Foundation and Gift from a Child has accomplished, not only last year, but in the past nine years. We are proud of the goals we have set and the amazing people who have joined us in the fight.

Because Michael’s decision to donate his brain to find a cure for cancer intersects with so many other important research initiatives, a wave of positive change is transforming the face of childhood brain cancer research.

But there is so much work to do: Survival rates for children diagnosed with brain cancer have flatlined over the last 40 years and brain cancer is the number one cause of death by disease for people 20 years and younger. We need to do things differently for future families!

Our 2022 Impact Report shows what we have accomplished and how we will accelerate breakthrough cancer research, improve treatments, and ultimately find CURES for childhood brain cancer.

For the past three years, we have been building the infrastructure to make post-mortem tissue donation possible anywhere in the country. GFAC is currently helping process tissue donations at about one-third of its capacity. To improve this rate, we need more families to make the decision to donate their child’s precious tissue.

We made more than $1 million in grants last year to fund tissue navigation, donation networks, and medulloblastoma research. We also continued to be companions to families braving their darkest days and promoted the idea that cancer prevention is the best cure.

With all that we have accomplished, we now focus our time and resources on raising awareness and changing behavior within the pediatric cancer community. Our 2022-2025 objectives include increasing tissue donations, building educational resources, and developing a network of strategic partners to act as advocates for post-mortem donation. Changing a culture is hard, and we are working toward a day when standard practice is to ask every family to consider post-mortem tissue donation.

To be in the best place to do this, we hired Deborah DuVair as a co-director with Patti Gustafson. We are stepping up our outreach and are presenting to hospitals and at conferences Read More On This

Always remembering the boy who started us on this path and the families we aim to help in pursuing Mikey’s Master Plan: “I’m going to give my life up, so we can see if we can find a cure for cancer.”

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