Walter and Jean Boek Global Autoimmune Institute

Autoimmune Disease is under-recognized, and much remains to be done to help individuals obtain the medical care, validation, and respect they need and deserve. Global Autoimmune Institute's goal is to change this. We are improving understanding and knowledge of autoimmune disease by funding scientific research, collaborating and funding education for individuals and medical professionals, providing best-sourced information on our website, promoting and supporting multidisciplinary medicine, validating and helping those who are navigating autoimmune disease, and raising awareness of the relatedness of autoimmune diseases.

Effective treatment of Autoimmune Disease.

Goal One: Identifying, collaborating and funding to address the most pressing scientific questions in autoimmune disease, likely to lead to new discoveries.

Goal Two: Educating medical professionals and the public about autoimmune disease, using innovative methods to increase the reach of essential information, through website, social media, events, webcasts.

Goal Three: Continue to expand our community by serving them, contribute to the efforts in medicine to improve understanding of those suffering with autoimmune disease. Tailoring education through innovation.

Global Autoimmune Institute has invested in leadership webinars, networking events (mostly virtual) and membership in philanthropic leadership organizations, to further the education and promote the development and steady improvement of the organization's leadership.

The strategic partnerships we engage in support many leadership activities including peer reviewed publications and talks presented at conferences and at medical professional meetings, education, training, and development of physician and other health care professional networks, as well as patients and families. We directly engage in social media in order to raise awareness and increase knowledge as well as to validate and be up to date on the concerns of those with autoimmune disease. We initiated and funded an important initiative with Nature Magazine which was the first published special section on Autoimmune Disease, and included material about our organization, our work, and our goals. We developed and published a free downloadable guide for those navigating autoimmune disease. We are the foremost source of valuable information.

Covid presented us with the challenge of helping our community exclusively remotely, but it proved exciting because we found we could provide an essential, much desired service to our community through our website and social media. We pivoted from our focus on in person events and networking to providing frequent science based updates, important information and many resources to our stakeholders. We found our organization consistently at the top of Google searches, and developed a steady viewership of aprox. 80,000/month. We monitored the analytics to understand what our viewers wanted, and tailored our resources and information to provide more of the information they were (are) clearly seeking, and watched for trends so that we could respond quickly. Our core value is caring, and we also responded to individual emails, and continued to operate our expanding monthly support group, which we changed from in person to zoom meetings. We postponed part of our grant giving efforts due to lab shut downs and reprioritizing of research efforts which created uncertainty. We had to postpone events in the pipeline as well as the development of a detailed fundraising strategy. We shifted to remote work and increased the workload of team members and expert contracted work, and learned to coordinate our work mostly via Slack, including our regular meetings. We held remote Board meetings instead of in person, as well as many other meetings, such as with those who are working on projects we are funding (scientists, physicians, and educators), and an annual day long event which we changed to remote format, in 2020.