My Nonprofit Reviews

This organization is a unique wonderful entity in the realm of oral, head and neck cancers. That they get so little notice for the major impact they have had in the world of advocacy work over more than two decades surprises me. As a professional who works in public health advocacy, I have personally engaged with them, and often been allied to OCF in my working life.

They have been a constant thoughtful, strategic, and tactical voice, one whose tenacity has impacted policy and procedure changes that will directly impact medicines direction inside agencies at the National Institutes of Health like the NIDCR and NCI. Their public health policy advocacy and lobbying the Centers for Disease Control, particularly during a long three year effort that culminated in allowing boys to be vaccinated to protect them from HPV alone will change the male oropharynx cancer incidence rate over the next generation. OCF’s work with others to pass the first legislation in 2009 with the coalition put together by Senator Ted Kennedy’s team that gave the FDA regulatory control over the Tobacco Industry, was a landmark they were part of. Even this week as I write this, their long-term efforts to influence tobacco policy with other partners working on tobacco harm reduction ideas and federal policy is yielding changes that will curb the addictive amount of nicotine in tobacco products.

The posts I read here mostly speak to their patent centric efforts. But people need to realize that their interests, efforts and impact are far broader. That they see the big picture and strategically think of long-term impact in their niche of public health, is not something I see in small charities. They have vision, coupled with achievable goals. This organization deserves support. It deserves far more visibility for its work than it gets, but it appears to put little money or effort into talking about its many accomplishments keeping its small staff focused on the work. I hope that will not hamper its future. It deserves to financially survive and so it can not just continue, but expand its impact. I came here today to broaden donors view of what they should expect from a charity. This one is the exemplar.