Message from Gilles Frydman, ACOR founder Ovarian Cancer and Us OVARIAN CANCER and US Ovarian Cancer and Us

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Monday, December 29, 2008

Message from Gilles Frydman, ACOR founder



From Gilles Frydman, ACOR founder


Dear list member,


Today I am going to ask you to support ACOR with a donation. If this sounds unusual, read on! Why does one of the world's largest cooperative of patient-run medical online communities ask for financial support from its users?


ACOR, which I founded in 1996, is built differently from almost every other cancer advocacy organization. We exist only online. We have a number of volunteer staff, just over 100. ACOR content is free to use by anyone. Our annual expenses are currently less than $350,000 dollars. We do a lot with very little money! But we should be doing more!


At its core, ACOR is driven by a global community of cancer patients and caregivers (more than 50,000 of you) - all dedicated to sharing knowledge freely. Over almost thirteen years, listmembers have contributed countless email messages, many of them of great value to other community members. More than 75,000 people come to our website/ listservs every day to access information, free of charge, free of bias and free of advertising.


But ACOR is more than a website. We share a common cause: Imagine a world in which every single cancer patient is given free and immediate access to valid, current and accurate knowledge to help them understand their disease, assess all available treatments and understand the long-term impact of a cancer diagnosis. That's our commitment. Day after day, we push a little more to make sure no one becomes another victim of the opaque medical world.


Your donation helps us in several ways. Most importantly, you will help us cover the increasing cost of managing global traffic to one of the most popular cancer websites on the Internet. Funds also will help us improve the software that runs the ACOR communities -- making it easier to search the archives, easier to read and to classify messages from others, and easier to organize the information you need to become a truly engaged and empowered patient/caregiver. We want to build new services that will help all of you meet others socially in more engaging ways than is possible with plain listservs. We want to give you new tools to tell your story and share with others pictures and videos. We would like to build the largest gallery of art from cancer patients, including visual art, moving images, poetry, etc. Finally we are committed to growing the free knowledge access world-wide, by recruiting new volunteers, developing communities in many languages and geared to minorities, and building strategic partnerships with foreign medical institutions.


ACOR is different. It's probably the largest cancer support system in history, run by volunteers and with content entirely generated by patients and caregivers. Like any real public health service, we don't believe advertising should have any place in an ACOR community or anywhere on our website(s). We want to keep all of these free and strong, but in order to make it happen we need the support of thousands of people like you.

I invite you to join us, at any level you feel comfortable: Your donation will help keep ACOR free for all those who need and will need access to support and information.


Come visit http://www.acor.org/donate/now/


Thank you,

Gilles Frydman

Founder, ACOR.org

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