From Passion to Action: Us TOO celebrates 20th birthday in August

From 'The "New" Prostate Cancer InfoLink'

Us TOO International — one of the two oldest prostate cancer advocacy and support organizations in the world — will be celebrating its 20th birthday with a major event in Chicago on August 20 and 21 this year, and everyone is invited!
A complete run down on the event is available on the Us TOO web site, and we suggest you click here to get all the details. Us TOO has been able to negotiate special low room rates at the symposium hotel and registration is also very reasonable.

A key feature of the celebration will be the special “Advocacy Summit” to be held in the morning on Friday, August 20th. Over the past two years, a number of prostate cancer not-for-profits have been working together to build “America’s Prostate Cancer Organizations,” a collaborative initiative that has set out to develop and act on consensus initiatives in the area of prostate cancer advocacy. Us TOO is very hopeful that — along with others — representatives of most of all of America’s Prostate Cancer Organizations will be participating in this “Advocacy Summit.” Prostate Cancer International and several others have already made the commitment to attend and has been working with Us TOO International to coordinate this event.

A place where the prostate cancer community still fails to match up with our breast cancer sisters is in motivating our members and the prostate cancer survivor community to take real political action in driving for greater research funding for prostate cancer and ensuring that legislation optimizes the appropriate and early detection of prostate cancer — with specific emphasis on identifying those patients at greatest risk for aggressive forms of prostate cancer that can lead to untimely death or severe loss of quality of life because of advanced or metastatic disease.

Earlier this year, America’s Prostate Cancer Organizations were influential in the development of two Congressional hearings on topics related to prostate cancer, and there have been other small victories as well. But it is time for us all to recognize and accept that bigger victories need a greater involvement from the entire prostate cancer community. We don’t need hours and days of people’s time. But we do need action. We need phone calls to your Congressman or Congresswoman about specific issues. We need e-mails and letters maybe half a dozen times a year to the same people. And we need to really sound as though we care because tens of thousands of voices are brought to bear on the same issues.

Hopefully the “Advocacy Summit” in Chicago can mark a new beginning. So see if you can find a little time in August for a trip to The Windy City. In the supposedly immortal words attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

From Passion to Action: Us TOO celebrates 20th birthday in August