Giving Tuesday 2023: Movember Foundation
Not yet the final plug for the year....
Howdy all — it’s Giving Tuesday, so here’s my formal plug for my favored charity, the Movember Foundation.
2023 Movember Fundraiser
Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Meep’s Fundraiser Progress for 2023
I haven’t given an update in a while, but here is where the fundraiser stands for 2023:
As of yesterday, the cumulative fundraising total stands at about $9.6K, which is a decent total, I think (and yes, some of that is my own, personal donations).
My story (really Stu’s)
For those new to STUMP, Stu is my husband (and I’m the MP portion).
I’m a life actuary, and I have loads of male friends. Prior to 2017, I had donated to my friends’ Movember fundraisers. In 2017, my huband was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. For his particular diagnosis, it’s treatable, but not curable.
I started my own fundraising in 2017, and as you can see from above, I’ve been pretty active since then. Stu had his own course of cancer treatments, and his cancer had been pretty under control until recently… it’s active again. One of these days, probably either his treatment or the cancer will kill him. We’re trying to push that as far out as possible.
Back in the day, he would have been dead years ago, as cancer as advanced as his was used to have a 5-year survival rate of 2%.
Cancer treatment has come a long way, but we can really help improve survival by promoting screening, treatment, and research.
Movember Foundation and Mortality
The Movember Foundation promotes screening for prostate cancer (one of the top cancers men contract, and very survivable if caught at an early stage), testicular cancer, and men’s mental health.
As I have detailed in recent posts, the recent trends through the pandemic have been bad. Here is a combo post showing recent trends for prostate cancer, suicide, and drug overdose age-adjusted death rates for males in the U.S.
Yay, prostate cancer mortality has improved over the decades (though stalled recently), but other causes of death have trended extremely poorly.
Movember Foundation is focusing efforts on men’s mental health as well in the effort to reduce these awful trends.
We do what we can, where we can.