Family Reach Foundation

Family Reach is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides non-medical financial support to families facing cancer. Treatment requires more than medicine — families need a roof over their heads and food on their tables to survive. If a family can’t meet these basic needs, cancer treatment takes a back seat. We work with patients, providers, and community organizations to challenge the systems that force families to choose between their health and their home. Together, we’re making financial treatment a standard of cancer care.

Building a world where no family has to choose between their health and their home.

Goal One: Grow our network of in-kind partners, launch new self-service navigation tools, and redesign how we deliver our services to ensure more families can meet their basic needs during cancer treatment.

Goal Two: Understand and deepen our engagement with the most under-resourced and financially vulnerable populations in the cancer community through our Cancer Equity Initiative.

Goal Three: Invest in technology, streamline our existing systems, align on how we communicate and share information internally, and develop an annual learning agenda for all of our key programs.

All Family Reach employees must complete 24 hours of professional development each year and receive a $200 stipend towards conferences, webinars, and other educational events and materials. Employees are also paired with another FR staff member, who serves as their mentor and go-to person for career advice and support. At an executive level, our CEO works closely with a leadership coach to discuss organizational development and change management as our nonprofit scales. Similarly, vice presidents are paired with mentors outside of the organization. They meet with these mentors regularly to learn best practices from beyond the nonprofit sector to further improve our reach and efficiency. We also dedicate one hour a month to leadership training for our department heads.

Strategic partnerships: We partner with private sector organizations to fund our Cancer Equity Initiative, which connects more Black and Hispanic/Latino communities to financial support. We then partner with regional nonprofits to distribute these funds to their communities. We have also launched a pilot program in Philadelphia and are working with local utility companies to connect families facing cancer to their financial assistance programs. We plan to expand this pilot across the US. Thought leadership: We present at conferences like The Atlantic's People vs. Cancer, Fortune Brainstorm Health, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. Our research is published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Policy advocacy: We collaborate with researchers, healthcare professionals, other nonprofits, and politicians as a member of the Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Social: We host our annual holiday fundraiser on social and email, raising more than $500,000 for families.

Through surveys and qualitative feedback from oncology social workers across the country, we learned that our application for financial support was difficult to navigate and time-consuming to complete. We spent the last year completely redesigning our application to address these challenges and connect families to our financial relief faster. With the support of internal and external IT experts, we took the application from 12 pages to five pages that can be completed in 15 minutes, instead of 30-45 minutes. The new application also provides greater application transparency up front, allowing us to screen out patients who don’t qualify earlier so that we can better serve those who do qualify. Adapting in this way has allowed us to improve our services and expand our impact on the cancer community. We are sending a follow-up survey to ensure our new application fully meets the needs of oncology social workers.