Thank you Camille, our outgoing JDRF Advocacy Grassroots Leadership Team Chair, for all of your hard work and all the campaigns you helped to oversee. We are glad you are not going too far! Take it away Camille!

To our inspiring JDRF Advocates all across the country – it has truly been my great honor to work with all of you in your advocacy work both as a Grassroots Leadership Team member, and also as your Chair. In the past 3 years, we’ve successfully worked to move the FDA to establish official guidelines on the path to an Artificial Pancreas (AP), completed two JDRF ‘Promise to Remember Me’ Campaigns, planned and hosted JDRF 2011 and 2013 Children’s Congress, AND we’ve renewed the Special Diabetes Program (SDP) before Congress twice. But that’s not all. I am willing to bet that every single JDRF grassroots volunteer leader has literally or figuratively held the hands of multiple newly-diagnosed families – or equally importantly – reached out to people diagnosed years ago, to give them hope and optimism for the future.

But this optimism isn’t just one of comforting words. It is optimism born of the reality of better treatments, therapies and technology just like the continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and the Artificial Pancreas. It also springs from the knowledge that WE grassroots leaders and advocates from every walk of life and from every corner of this country, have personally played a role in moving critical and ground-breaking type 1 diabetes (T1D) research forward.

For us as volunteer leaders and advocates, the important work we do with JDRF isn’t our job, it’s our mission. This work we have done with JDRF – and the successes we’ve had – has changed the way I look at the world. I am sure it has for all of you, too.

To our exceptional JDRF staff members, both past and present, thank you for your partnership. Thank you also for all you do to help make us successful in our work – by leading the charge up Capitol Hill to influence our elected national lawmakers. And thank you for your friendship, guidance and leadership. This past fiscal year (2014) in particular has been a full one: Children’s Congress, then Promise, another SDP renewal and the big sign-on letter–with the wrinkle of a government shutdown thrown in the mix; after elections we executed the New Member Outreach Initiative (NMOI), and of course one of my personal favorites, JDRF Government Day.

My time as Chair will always remain a high point in my life, and next to the pride I have in my own family, it is the thing in my life of which I am most proud. But now, we barrel headlong into a new year for JDRF Advocacy, fiscal year 2015! I am very excited to begin working under Mary Horn as the new Chair of the Grassroots Leadership Team. I know Mary has big plans for Advocacy and she has the tenacity to see them through.

Whether it has been in reference to securing a Promise meeting, renewing the SDP, or in our commitment to finding a cure – we advocates have sometimes been told that what we’re trying to do is “impossible.” Well, to quote my favorite poet, Theodore Roethke, “What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.”

You, JDRF Advocates, specialize in the impossible. You ate it for breakfast during the Promise Campaign, and you served it for dessert when we renewed the SDP, fully-funded, for another year!

Thank you for letting me lead this wonderful advocacy team for the past three years. It has truly been an honor. Keep up the excellent work, everyone! I am so grateful to continue working with you – until the day we beat diabetes, and type one becomes type none!

Camille Nash
Chair, JDRF Grassroots Leadership Team, 2011-14