Our Community Needs Urgent Support

We have extraordinary news: we've secured a $44,000 grant to launch Canary Corps, our not-yet-launched national peer-support program to help people with ME, Long COVID, and related conditions keep their Medicaid coverage.

But here's the truth: we cannot launch the Canary Corps until we raise the full $88,000. That grant only gets us halfway. Your gift is what makes this program real.

Here's why this moment is so urgent:

Medicaid is under assault. Unprecedented cuts and burdensome new work requirements threaten to strip care from millions, and people with ME, Long COVID, and other infection-associated chronic conditions will bear the worst of it.

People with ME were the canaries in the coalmine, sounding the alarm on infection-associated chronic illness long before COVID-19 became a mass-disabling event. Now we're sounding the alarm again.

Our Frail & Furious advocacy campaign is fighting to ensure ME and Long COVID are recognized as qualifying conditions for medically frail exemptions from new Medicaid work requirements. And our #MillionsMissing actions, leading up to May 12th and continuing through the year, are keeping the pressure on.

But advocacy alone won't be enough.

Even with the right policies in place, people in our community will still face a gauntlet of paperwork, deadlines, and bureaucratic confusion. Many will lose coverage not because they're ineligible, but because they couldn't navigate the process alone. The physical and cognitive barriers our community faces make this burden especially cruel.

Canary Corps is our answer. We'll train volunteers from within our own community to host accessible virtual workshops where people can learn what they need to do, get hands-on help, and connect with others facing the same challenges. #MEAction has already pioneered in-home Medicaid support for people with ME and Long COVID in Minnesota. Canary Corps takes that work national.

To launch, we need to hire a social worker and a dedicated volunteer coordinator to work alongside our Director of Advocacy, Ben HsuBorger. To begin this program, we need to secure $88,000. We have half. We need you to help us raise the rest.

The timeline is urgent: federal guidance on work requirement exemptions is expected by June 2026, and state notices to Medicaid enrollees start going out this fall. We need this program so people in our community won't fall through the cracks.

A $44,000 grant is sitting there, ready to go to work. But it can't launch this program alone. Please make a gift today and help us raise the $44,000 we still need to make Canary Corps a reality.

Donate to Fund Canary Corps