Fighting cancer with hope.
OUR AIMS
The Focus of Our Efforts
FUND RAISING
Supporting Treatment
EDUCATION & OUTREACH
Raising Awareness
NGO COLLABORATION
Doing What's Needed
THE BIG C PROJECT
Cancer during COVID-19
In June 2020, Umeed at Brown worked in collaboration with VCare Foundation to raise approximately $9,500 in funds for cancer patients stranded in Mumbai due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
CONTEXT
Many low-income families with cancer patients are forced to travel to Mumbai with the hope of better treatment. They sell most of their belongings including land and jewellery inherited over generations to afford this. However, getting to the city is only the first of their obstacles. Patients and their families struggle to put together whatever money they have left to pay for lodging, nourishment, and medical procedures. In addition to those grappling with the pandemic, patients across the country with chronic illnesses such as cancer are unable to receive critical care treatment. These struggles were dramatically worsened in the COVID-19 world order.
IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN
These families and patients were deeply challenged as lockdown orders shut down most stores and ration shops around them. Nutritious food, essential to sustaining the body for treatment, was often unavailable. Much needed masks and relief medicines grew harder to procure, making it more difficult to alleviate a patient's side effects (for example, for ulcers, nausea, and diarrhea). Furthermore, with the shutdown of public transport, patients had no way of getting to hospitals for treatment or emergencies. Mumbai’s Tata Memorial hospital, one of the busiest cancer hospitals in the country, postponed around 30% of ‘non-urgent’ chemotherapies and surgeries. This in turn contributed to disease progression, that would require more aggressive treatment, following the pandemic. This combination of a shortage in food, medicines, and transportation strained these families beyond measure, and as a result their stay in these cities grewincreasingly unaffordable and challenging.
OUR SOLUTION:
Over two weeks in June 2020, Umeed at Brown raised over 7,30,000 rupees (approximately $9500) for V Care Foundation, using an online platform Fueladream.
All funds raised by our campaign were used to support patients with food, medical aid, masks, transport, accommodation, and treatment both during and after the pandemic.
The V Care Foundation uses funds to finance treatment, provide nutritional support, childcare support, palliative support, and improving daily living and dignity for low income patients.
INFORMATIONAL BOOKLET
Head and Neck Cancers for patients at V Care Foundation
CONTEXT
Indian patients suffer disproportionately from head and neck cancers due to the widespread consumption of tobacco in its various forms. Having volunteered and worked with several Head and Neck cancer patients, Umeed members have created a booklet called ‘A Patient’s Guide to Head and Neck Cancer’.
DISTRIBUTION
This booklet is being distributed by the V Care Foundation to various patients who work with it. Umeed’s goal is to share and hand out the booklet to lower income families in small villages – as it offers information about early symptoms, methods of prevention, as well as the importance of elimination of tobacco from one’s diet, given the problems that manifest from it. In addition, it reiterates the need for hygiene and sanitation while struggling with the disease.
AIM
Seeking to help not only suffering patients, but also the larger uneducated population, who are unaware of such diseases, our booklet highlights the ways in which cancer should be dealt with - by patients and their families, such that both physical and emotional pain can be mitigated as far as possible. Most low-income families, due to lack of access to medical facilities and doctors, are left helpless in the face of cancer, and do not know how to proceed with regards to the line of treatment.
IMPACT AND REACH
Our hope is to create awareness about the causes of the disease, such that patients understand how to go about treatment without being in complete ignorance as much of the rural population is today. In order to reach out to as many people as possible, this booklet is being translated into three different languages, apart from English. These include Hindi, Marathi and Gujurati.