FUNDRAISER
We have surpassed our $200,000 #MillionsMissing fundraising goal because of the incredible support from our community! Your support is crucial to keeping our advocacy work going strong.
Because of your support, we will continue to:
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Advocate before Congress and NIH to fund the ME/CFS Research Roadmap.
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Fight to protect Medicaid health insurance for our most vulnerable.
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Build the medical community’s understanding about ME/CFS, including our recent Emergency Department Program that will establish updated clinical guidelines for ERs across the country.
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Launch pilot programs to help our community access desperately needed benefits and social services.
If you haven’t donated yet, there is still time to make a difference today! We are still fundraising to fund these programs:
Canary Corps: Safety Net for Our Most Vulnerable
#MEAction plans to launch Canary Corps, a social support program helping people with ME, Long COVID, and other infection-associated chronic illnesses access Medicaid, navigate new work requirements, and connect with Home and Community-Based Services. But we can't do it without you.
Tens of thousands of people in our community are at risk of losing the healthcare they need to survive. 24% of Medicaid recipients with disabilities never enrolled through a formal disability pathway, which means they have no protected status when work requirements kick in. Without help navigating the paperwork, eligible people will lose coverage.
We know what real support for our community looks like. Our Minnesota Home Help Navigation Program has spent the past year helping people with ME and Long COVID apply for in-home support through Medicaid, and it demonstrated what is possible when the resources are there. Canary Corps is our next step in taking this work national. To launch, we need to hire a social worker and a dedicated volunteer coordinator, who will work alongside our Director of Advocacy, Ben HsuBorger. They are the difference between someone keeping their healthcare and losing it.
The window to act is now. Please make a gift today.
Help Us Harness Storytelling to Change the Game
Since Unrest, #MEAction has reshaped how the CDC and Mayo Clinic talk about ME. We've had co-authored research published in Nature. We secured a long-overdue diagnostic code and grew MEpedia to more than 40 million views. We put 40,000 people in the streets for #MillionsMissing, and we warned the world about post-exertional malaise before most of medicine had caught up. None of this would have been possible without you.
For the first time since Unrest, we are genuinely capturing the attention of lawmakers. We are closer than we have ever been to winning federal investment in the ME/CFS Research Roadmap.
But this is also the moment of greatest danger, and we need your help.
More people are reaching out to #MEAction than at any point in our history, and the need grows every day. Medicaid cuts threaten the care people depend on to survive. Patients are still turned away from emergency rooms by doctors who don't recognize what's killing them. Housing and disability access hang by a thread.
The only good news is that we know exactly what to do. Every one of these threats is decided in a hearing room or a doctor's office, and nothing changes a decision-maker's mind like a story they can't forget.
That is why we are pairing the power of storytelling with our advocacy expertise to amplify ME voices and channel them straight into the fight for policy change. Working with the Writers Guild Institute (the WGA's nonprofit), we will expand on our existing partnership to train advocates across the country to tell their own stories in a way that speaks directly to the policies we need most. And we are putting those stories on film, once again.
If you believed in Unrest and are proud of the success, we are asking you to help us harness the power of stories one more time and change the lives of people with ME at the most crucial moment yet.
