Michael’s Master Plan and the Future of Gift from a Child
Since 2016, the GFAC operations center has been a standing desk at a bedroom window, a front hall closet and a mailbox in Woodridge, IL. This summer the operations center has moved to the offices of the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) in Philadelphia, kinda like the Jefferson’s “movin’ on up to the east side” in the ‘70’s sitcom. We are overjoyed for what this means for the GFAC program and thrilled to tell you all about it!
Most simply, GFAC focuses on everything leading up to and through a PM donation. CBTN is a research-based consortium made up of 33 children’s hospitals around the globe. CBTN focuses on everything required to maximize that donated tissue’s potential to accelerate breakthroughs in childhood brain cancer. For families, this means confidence their child’s tissue will make a difference. For the worldwide research community, this means free and open access to more PM tissue and the data it generates. To borrow a line from Jerry Maguire, GFAC & CBTN complete each other.
Due to the merger, the future of GFAC will be shaped by some of the best scientific minds working in pediatric brain tumor research and the MBA’s and project managers who understand the science and know how to get things done.
GFAC Operations: A New Look
It has taken two years of monthly leadership meetings, the work of five committees, and lots of can-do attitude from the Swifty and CBTN teams to work out the details, create a vision and strategic plan for merging GFAC into CBTN. Our plan is built around four areas of focus 1) PM Donations 2) Outreach & Education 3) Translational Research 4) Administration. Happy to share the details with any Swifty donor (email patti@swiftyfoundation.org) but here are some highlights
- The mission of GFAC is to make it possible for any child to donate PM tissue and to change the culture so all families are given the opportunity to donate PM tissue.
- The 7 Regional Centers of Excellence, a tissue navigator at each location, working together to serve all families and medical teams across the country.
- The CBTN has changed its research protocol to add the collection of PM tissue through GFAC. There is now a formal expectation that all CBTN member institutions will make PM donation available to their families.
- A new position, GFAC-CBTN Manager of PM Operations, was created as the liaison to all the CBTN member sites, training staff and helping coordinate donations. The position reports to the Director of Clinical Research Ops at CBTN.
- Swifty’s Ginny McLean will fill the new position of GFAC Program Director and be responsible for the strategic direction, leadership, and oversight of the GFAC program at CBTN and report directly to CBTN’s Executive Director.
- A GFAC PM Working Group was established to accelerate research breakthroughs using PM tissue by enhancing scientific collaboration between the Centers of Excellence. Their first project is to longitudinally map the evolution of a patient’s tumor from diagnosis to death, capturing the genomic and clinical data from all stages of a patient’s disease history. These maps will be created for every disease type and available for any researcher to interrogate.
- The Swifty team, Patti, Deb and Al will meet twice a month with the CBTN team: one for OKR progress reporting and one for strategy.
The involvement of Patti (director), Deborah du Vair (Swifty’s MBA/project manager) and Al (board chair) will remain mostly the same, except Swifty will no longer fundraise. This will eliminate much of the admin work of running a public charity and is a big step in our succession plan. If Michael’s Master Plan is to make the impact we all know it is capable of, it must live beyond its founders, allowing new leadership to develop his plan in ways we couldn’t even dream of.
Michael’s Master Plan Fund
Here is another Jerry Maguire reference, “Show me the money!” Not to be crass, but when there is no money, there is no mission. In the coming years, as GFAC expands through CBTN’s research-based consortium, there will be opportunity to diversify the funding streams supporting the mission … grants from the National Cancer Institute, Big Pharma, the Department of Defense (yes you read that right) to name a few.
Swifty wants to provide a long enough “funding runway” to allow time for these new funding sources to takeoff. We estimate it will take 5-7 years before GFAC secures enough alternate funding streams to make it sustainable without Swifty’s help. To provide the runway that will continue to fund GFAC we created the Michael’s Master Plan Fund (MMPF) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Foundation.
Swifty made a $744,886 gift in the spring of 2024 to establish the MMPF and fund the GFAC operations center at CBTN through 2027. The fund will financially support GFAC in all the ways the Swifty Foundation has these past 8 years. It will fund salaries for tissue navigators, autopsy costs, advocacy and education work, and GFAC based research. Our Swifty team will have oversight of the MMPF. In addition, our family made a commitment to contribute $3m over the next five years to the MMPF.