 We want to wish all of you a very happy 2022!
We hope that 2022 will bring more joy, prosperity, and good health to you and your loved ones. As we continue to live through a global pandemic, it's important to reflect on our accomplishments through the past year and look forward to our goals for the new year. 2021 Accomplishments In 2021, due to COVID-19, our funding was severely cut. However, our organization survived another year of the pandemic! We are proud that we have been able to stay running (at a lower capacity) so far and we have no plans of stopping. In 2021, we were able to: 1.) Continue publishing educational information about lung health. 2.) Continue keeping our donors updated through our monthly newsletters. 3.) Take time to restructure and reorganize our Lung Transplant Patient Support Program while it was on hold. 5.) Open a new online merchandise store with brand new Lung Girl merchandise with international shipping. 6.) Work with a grant writer to help us increase revenue for 2022 7.) Raise funds despite a pandemic through Facebook, Amazon Smile, and individual donations on our website. Thank you to all of you who donated to our charity or helped us raise funds in 2021! You are helping us keep going so we can continue to help lung transplant patients. To those of you who requested a Lung Transplant Patient "care package" in 2021, we haven't forgotten about you. Please keep reading for some good news! 2022 Goals We have ambitious goals for 2022. This year we will: 1.) Increase revenue through grants, sponsorships, sales, fundraisers, and marketing. 2.) Relaunch our Lung Transplant Patient Support Program with
4.) Increase online educational content. 5.) Increase the impact our organization is making in the community. In the United States, surgeons perform about 2,000 lung transplants every year. This has increased due to COVID-19 patients that need new lungs. Our mission is to be able to help every single lung transplant patient in the country through funding lung transplant research and supporting the patients with medical bills and other resources. This is the only way to change the dreary statistics of lung transplantation and save lives. We are very excited to keep working and growing the impact of our nonprofit organization in 2022. We hope that you will join us in our mission. If you would like to support us with any of these goals, please donate now.
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 We wish you a very happy holiday season!We hope this holiday season comes with quality time with loved ones and delicious food. We hope you and your family stay safe and enjoy our second holiday season since the beginning of the pandemic.
'Tis the season for giving. Lung transplant patients have been especially impacted by COVID-19 due to their immunocompromised status. Please help us support lung transplant patients through this difficult time by providing them with resources, funding, and care packages. Please donate today.   We have a new and improved merchandise store with many new products that include clothes, accessories like phone cases, and homeware like pillows and blankets.
Our new store ships worldwide! Did you know that 100% of the proceeds from selling our merchandise are used to support our organization?
You can help lung transplant patients by buying something cool for yourself or your loved ones! Shop now!  As you all may know by now, January 2nd is Sid Vahal’s birthday!
Every year, we celebrate his birthday along with a new year. The Sid Foundation was created to keep Sid’s legacy alive and help lung transplant patients like him beat the odds. Today, Sid would have been 36 years old. Although lung transplant complications took him away at 29 years old, he will always be with us in our hearts. Thank you for helping us keep Sid’s legacy alive by supporting The Sid Foundation! You can learn more about Sid’s story here. Happy 2021! First, we want to acknowledge how difficult 2020 was. Many of us lost friends and family to COVID-19. Our country continues to be in a state of racial unrest. So many people are struggling for food and shelter. It was an especially dangerous year for lung transplant patients because of their compromised immune system which increases their chances of dying from COVID-19. We are excited to hear that the COVID-19 vaccine is being provided to healthcare workers. However, it will be months before it is available to everyone.
As we reflect on 2020 and all the hardships we have faced around the world, we want to express our solidarity and our support to those affected by the events of the past year. We cannot simply move on from these events, however, we can continue to try harder to make the world better in 2021. 2020 Accomplishments We lost much of our funding in 2020. Due to COVID-19, we had an understandably sharp decline in donors. However, we continued our work at a smaller scale.
We are grateful to have been able to accomplish most of our goals for 2020 even if they were at a much smaller scale. Here is what we have planned for 2021... 2021 Goals COVID-19 will continue to be a part of our world in 2021 so we have adjusted our goals to take that into account. We set these goals with a low budget in mind, however, if our funding increases, we will adjust the goals accordingly.
Despite the difficult times, we have hope that things will get better in the future and that we will be able to continue helping lung transplant patients beat the odds and thrive post transplantation. Thank you for supporting The Sid Foundation for all these years and for helping us keep Sid’s legacy alive. We hope you all have better times and good health in the new year! Click here to make a donation to The Sid Foundation. The Sid Foundation and Lung Girl Face MasksYou can now get face masks with the our logo or Lung Girl and Ecmo on it for only $14.95 plus shipping at our online store! All proceeds from these face masks will go towards our Lung Transplant Patient Support Program. Buy them here.
Most of us take breathing for granted until we or someone we know begins to suffer from COPD, asthma or another debilitating lung disease. In addition to long term breathing problems, many of these diseases can lead to a lung transplant. Maintaining good lung health is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic. This virus attacks the lungs and causes severe breathing problems even after your recover from it. Here are some activities that you can do to strengthen your lungs and decrease your chances of needing a transplant in the future. These activities are listed according to fitness level. If you aren’t particularly athletic, start with the beginner level activities. If you are an athletic person, try them all! Beginner Fitness Level (Recommended for any age group):  Credit: https://completewellbeing.com/article/laughter-yoga-no-laughing-matter/ 1. Laughter Yoga- Laughter yoga combines breathing practices from traditional yoga with deep belly laughter. Deep belly laughter forces your lungs to expand more than they normally would and replaces the carbon dioxide that sits at the bottom of your lungs with oxygen. In between the laughter exercises, laughter yoga also incorporates deep breathing exercises causing you to take fewer, more effective, breaths overall.  Credit: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/471611392209564126/ 2. Yoga- Yoga is founded upon breathing practices. In yoga, you consciously take long, deep breaths while practicing different poses and/or meditating. The long inhales and even longer exhales force the carbon dioxide that sits at the bottom of your lungs out and makes room for more oxygen. These exercises also help you slow down your breathing so you take fewer, more effective, breaths. Intermediate Fitness Level (Recommended for any age group):  Credit: https://biofriendlyplanet.com/green-ideas/eco-friendly/eco-friendly-cities-biking-your-way-around-town/ 3. Biking- Biking is a cardiovascular exercise that forces you to use your lungs to their maximum capacity for an extended period of time which strengthens them. Advanced Fitness Level (Recommended age group: teens-50s):  Credit: https://www.healthxchange.sg/fitness-exercise/exercise-tips/why-run-health-benefits-running 4. Long Distance Running- Similar to biking, long distance running forces you to use your lungs to their maximum capacity for an extended period of time. This helps you get rid of all the carbon dioxide that sits at the bottom of your lungs and makes room for more oxygen. More oxygen in your lungs means more oxygen in your blood which results in better overall health.  Credit: https://medium.com/@shaww099/what-is-hiit-workout-ae27e33afbb 5. High Intensity Cardio -HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), sprints, and jump rope are examples of high intensity cardio. They include a regimen of short bursts of anaerobic exercises which leave you out of breath. They are an intense cardiovascular activity that force you to use your lungs to their maximum capacity. The more you use your lungs to their full capacity, the healthier they will be.
If you struggle with your lung capacity, try starting with beginner level exercises like laughter yoga and slowly advancing to the more difficult ones like biking around town or in nature.  In 2019, we donated some of the funds we raised to the University of Kentucky Hospital Lung Transplant Program for the second time. The 2019 donation was used in the following ways: 1.) Supported Research Project 1: "Extracorporeal Photopheresis for the Management of Progressive Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome in Medicare-Eligible Recipients of Lung Allografts." 2.) Supported Research Project 2: "A Phase III, Prospective, Multicenter, Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial to Demonstrate the Effectiveness and Safety of Liposomal Cyclosporine A (L-CsA) Inhalation Solution Delivered via the PARI Investigational eFLOW Device plus Standard of Care versus Standard of Care Alone in the Treatment of Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome in Patients post Double Lung Transplantation." 3.) Supported Research Project 3: "A Phase 3, Multicenter Randomized Open label Active controlled Study to Assess the Efficacy and Safety of Maribavir Treatment Compared to Investigator assigned treatment in transplant recipients with Cytomegalovirus Infections." 4.) Helped lung transplant patients at the hospital pay for post transplantation medication. We also donated 20 care packages to the hospital to distribute to their lung transplant patients. To learn more about what's in our care packages click here. Thank you so much to all our donors for making this possible. You are helping lung transplant patients beat the odds and thrive by supporting our organization. We could not have done this without you! To read a detailed report of all the research we supported through our donation, click on the PDF below: 
 Image credit: "blacklivesmatter - July 09, 2016 (04 of 42).jpg" by micurs is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 We are deeply saddened by the state of our country right now.
As a nonprofit, our work is always to help those who are underserved or those whose voices are unheard in the community. In the last five years, despite meeting and getting to know many lung transplant patients, we couldn’t help but notice the lack of diversity in people who are able to get a lung transplant in this country. It is because of economic and racial inequality in the United States that many people of color do not have access to the healthcare system. This means that there are many people of color who have lung diseases and need lung transplants, but cannot afford to see a doctor or get a transplant because of a lack of health insurance or funding. Because of this disparity, we have been able to help very few people of color who need lung transplants. They often just don’t have the resources to get one. Our goal for the near future is to continue to build ourselves and raise more funds so that we can not only financially assist lung transplant patients who are already on their way to getting a transplant, but also have the resources and funding to help more people of color who may not even get the opportunity to see a doctor about their lung health issues and help them pay for an entire transplant. The state of our country is especially grave right now. Again, due to racial inequality, COVID-19 has been disproportionately killing Black and Indigenous Americans. On top of that, today police brutality is one of the leading causes of deaths for Black males in America. The combination of COVID-19 and racial inequality affects lung transplant patients of color in more devastating ways than white lung transplant patients and makes their survival much more difficult. In addition to lung transplants being expensive, over half of lung transplant patients do not live more than 5 years post transplant. These odds of survival are lessened even more for transplant patients of color due to the factors I mentioned earlier. We stand in solidarity with our Black lung transplant patients as well as Black Americans with lung health issues. We stand in solidarity with all Black Americans during this difficult time. We hope to continue to grow our small nonprofit to serve your needs more efficiently in the near future. I am the President of The Sid Foundation and am a woman of color. Although nonprofits like ours (run by POC) are statistically doomed to fail within the first couple of years and do not receive as much funding as nonprofits run by white board members and administrators, we are going to continue to beat the odds to serve our community. Due to COVID-19, our organization has taken a huge hit financially. We are not stopping our work, however, and will continue to keep moving forward until we see better times. We hope that our immunocompromised transplant patients have the ability to stay home and stay safe. If not, we hope that you have access to protective gear to keep yourself as safe as possible. To our supporters who are not immunocompromised, please keep transplant patients and anyone else that might be immunocompromised in your thoughts as you go about your daily activities to make sure you are making the environment safer for them. Here are some resources that you can use to help you stay safe during these times. You can also donate to these organizations to help others stay safe: The World Health Organization The National Healthcare for the Homeless Council The American Civil Liberties Union Black Lives Matter The Minnesota Freedom Fund  This month is The Sid Foundation’s 5 year anniversary! Over the last 5 years, we’ve raised more than $50,000 to support lung transplant research and patients. We’ve also published three Lung Girl comic books, created tons of educational content online, and hosted several community events. We couldn’t have done all of this without your help! A huge thank you to our corporate sponsors:
Our recurring individual donors: Damini Mathur Alka Vahal Rakesh Vahal Gaurav Mathur Sonu Sachdev And all individual donors (see list here) for helping us grow throughout the years! Also, thank you to all of you who purchased a comic book, t-shirt, or other merchandise from us. We are so grateful for all your support and hope to continue to make you proud to sponsor our work. The Sid Foundation was established one year after my brother Sid Vahal passed away due to complications from his double lung transplant. My family and I have been on a mission to try our best to help anyone else in Sid’s shoes. It has been a privilege to be able to help so many lung transplant patients over the last five years with your undying support. Since we can’t have a party and thank you in person due to COVID-19, here’s a video of me expressing my gratitude: |
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