Solidarity

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 alack 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