Every week I get to do something that genuinely fills me up: stop and pay attention to the people who are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, changing things. Not waiting for permission. Not waiting for the system to catch up. Just showing up, doing the work, and dragging the rest of us forward with them. This is Volume 2 of This Week in Advocacy, and if last week was any indication, we are not going to run out of incredible humans to celebrate anytime soon. Let’s get into it.
Sarah Leathers — Food Is Medicine Is a Movement
Sarah Leathers showed up at FIMCON this year, and I mean that in every sense of the word. The first-ever FIMCON brought together more than 800 leaders from healthcare, research, policy, and community organizations, all focused on advancing the Food Is Medicine movement. That alone is remarkable. But what stood out to me about Sarah’s post wasn’t the scale of the conference. It was the line about being there alongside members of the CT Food as Medicine Alliance. That’s the thing about real advocates, they don’t just attend rooms, they bring their people with them.
Food as medicine isn’t fringe anymore. It’s a growing, evidence-backed framework that says what you eat is healthcare, and access to nutritious food is a health equity issue. Sarah is in that work, building that coalition, and showing up at the national table while keeping her roots firmly planted in her community. That’s the whole job, honestly. If you’re on LinkedIn, go find her and give her a follow, she’s the kind of voice worth adding to your feed. You can find her on Linkedin.
Diana Holmes, MBA — Painting the Hill Purple
I love this one. Diana Holmes and her crew with Alzheimer’s Association, went to Capitol Hill this week with a clear, specific, achievable ask: get every senator and congressman to co-sponsor the ASAP Act. Not a vague call to “do more” for Alzheimer’s. A bill. A vote. A mechanism. The ASAP Act would allow Medicare to cover blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease, which means earlier detection, earlier intervention, and more time for the people who need it most.
Diana is an MBA who clearly understands that advocacy without strategy is just noise. She paired passion with precision, and that combination is what moves legislation. The visual of “painting the hill purple,” the color of the Alzheimer’s movement, is exactly the kind of moment that gets staffers to pay attention and gets lawmakers to ask what they missed. This is what constituent pressure looks like when it’s done right. Follow Diana on LinkedIn and watch what she does next, because she is clearly not done.
Andy Goodspeed — Turning His Battle Into Someone Else’s Chance
Andy Goodspeed is from Fairfield, Maine. He’s a stage 4 stomach cancer survivor. And instead of retreating after everything his body has been through, he stepped in front of a camera at his local news station to talk about early detection, because he knows that the version of this story where someone catches it sooner has a better ending.
I know this kind of advocacy personally. When you survive something that statistically you weren’t supposed to, you face a choice: get on with your life and try to forget, or turn around and face it head-on so someone else has a fighting chance. Andy chose the harder road. He’s out there doing research awareness work, talking to his community, and using the platform of his own survival to push for the kind of early screening that might have changed his own story. Local news matters. Community visibility matters. One interview in Fairfield, Maine can reach the exact person who needed to hear it. Andy, thank you for sharing yours.
Those are your three advocates for June 7, 2026. Three different issues, three different platforms, one common thread: people who decided that their experience, painful as it may have been, was worth putting to work for someone else.
If this resonated with you, subscribe to Advocacy at Work so you never miss a week. And if you know someone who deserves to be in this spot: a patient advocate, a caregiver, a community organizer, a policy fighter, nominate them. Reply to this post, I want to hear about them.