We turned our Helpline into a lifeline for thousands of people in need―bringing in additional navigators/resource specialists and expanding our hours of operation. All told, we answered 14,779 calls and distributed $250 emergency grants to 1,604 families through our Cancer Emergency Fund. We grew our affiliate network and built out a new virtual platform to make our services more accessible to more people.

COVID-19 was just one of 2020’s big stories. The other, of course, was racial equity. We launched a new task force, Activating Change Through Intentional Voices for Equity (ACTIVE), dedicated to examining race, social injustice, and health care equity from the inside out. ACTIVE will work to create a climate of inclusion within CSC while strengthening outreach to underserved populations and stakeholders.

In other developments, we continued our collaboration with the first-ever culturally adapted cancer care center on the Navajo Nation, launched last year in Arizona. And just two days after the Inauguration First Lady Jill Biden joined our former Executive Chair, Kim Thiboldeaux, at the DC-based Whitman-Walker Health, a CSC partner, to emphasize the importance of cancer screenings during the pandemic. We remain forever grateful to the leaders of the Navajo Nation, Dr.Biden, and all our affiliates and health care partners for their compassion and support.

Have you seen our updated logo and website? In refreshing our brand, we had a clear objective in mind―to visually unify our many departments and underscore how they all work together as a community to deliver on our mission. For our website, we concentrated on making it more user-friendly and intuitive so patients and families could easily find the information they were looking for. We also created our very own virtual assistant, Ruby, an animated GPS with a heart, to help them on their way.

COVID-19 was a shock to the system no one could predict, but it transformed us into an even more agile and proactive organization. Thanks to our friends and people like you we are proof positive that our community is stronger than cancer.