How COVID-19 Has Impacted one Non-Profit's Fundraising Efforts for Breast Reconstruction Surgery After Cancer

As the new coronavirus has spread across the United States, unemployment rates have reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. As a result, millions of residents have filed for unemployment benefits.

In a recent interview with CURE®, Morgan Hare, a founding member of the AiRS Foundation, discussed how the organization has decided to put fundraising efforts on the back burner since the start of COVID-19.

Additionally, Hare discussed how the organization, which helps educate women with breast cancer about their reconstruction options and meet their co-pays or pay for their surgery, has received fewer calls from applicants recently.

Hare stressed, however, that the organization is still sticking to its mission, even if it is not actively fundraising at this time.

Transcript:

That's a problem. It's very hard during this time period to go out and fund-raise. I think people are very worried about how much they have lost in the stock market, and what's going to happen, are they going to be employed, not be employed. We have sort of at this moment backed off from doing fundraising if someone wants to make a donation, trust me we would like it, but we understand that this is a difficult time. So, we have sort of put fundraising a little bit on the backburner but again anyone who wants to make a donation we would be really happy to receive donations at this point.

Luckily, we have no backlog, we have continued to support this in any way because we don't want anyone who is ready not to have the surgery. So, between my business partner, Janet Denlinger, and Dr. Rohrich, we will continue to fund this to make sure no one goes without their surgery during this time.

It has dipped. I would say I was getting four or five calls a week, and maybe last week I had two. So, I would say that people are not focusing on this quite as much as they had been. Probably because their doctors are telling them that their reconstructive surgery is being put on hold. But the ones that were in the cue, we're still funding and moving those along so anyone who is doing surgery, we're making sure that that happens. But most of the plastic surgeons are not doing anything that is considered not essential surgeries.