This Week in Advocacy - Vol. 8

Survivorship doesn't end at remission

Every week I sit down to write this and think: these people didn’t have to do any of this. Nobody asked them to turn their hardest experiences into fuel for someone else’s fight. They just did. That’s what advocacy looks like when it’s real — not a title, not a program, just people deciding that what happened to them is going to mean something. This week’s three advocates are doing exactly that, and I want to make sure you know their names.

Wenora Johnson LinkedIn

Wenora just published a piece with Cancer-Community.com that I think a lot of survivors are going to feel in their chest. She’s writing about the financial aftermath of a cancer diagnosis — not the treatment costs, but what comes after. The bills that keep arriving after you’re supposed to be celebrating survival. The lost income. The credit that took a hit while you were just trying to get through the week.

Wenora’s argument is one I believe deeply: financial toxicity isn’t a side effect of treatment. It’s a survivorship issue. Full stop. And until we treat it that way — until oncology teams, payers, and advocacy organizations actually build financial recovery into the survivorship conversation — we’re telling people they’re healed when they’re still drowning.

What makes this piece land is that Wenora isn’t theorizing. She’s drawing on her own experience, and you can feel that in every paragraph. She’s not pointing at a problem from a distance. She lived it, and now she’s naming it clearly enough that nobody can pretend they didn’t see it. That’s the kind of advocacy that actually moves things.

Go read her piece. Then share it with someone who thinks survivorship is just a scan result.

Sharon Rivera Sanchez LinkedIn

Sharon was the featured speaker at the Global Colon Cancer Association’s July member meeting, and her topic was one that the research world keeps treating as optional: why every community deserves a seat at the research table.

Here’s what makes Sharon’s voice different. She’s not making this argument from the outside looking in. She’s a five-time clinical trial participant. She has sat in those rooms, completed those protocols, and watched what happens when the people running the study don’t look like the people who need the treatment most. She knows firsthand what underrepresentation actually costs — not in a report, but in outcomes.

Her message to the GCCA is one I wish more researchers and trial sponsors would sit with: representation isn’t a box to check in your IRB application. It’s a question of whether tomorrow’s treatments are going to work for everyone, or just for the people who already had easiest access to yesterday’s. Those are two very different outcomes, and we only get to choose one.

The full session is available to watch, and I’d encourage you to. Sharon is a clear, compelling speaker, and this is a conversation the field needs to keep having until the data actually changes.

Ebonie Michelle, MPH LinkedIn

Disclosure: Ebonie and I are in the same 2026 Cancer Nation Leadership Academy cohort — so yes, I’m a little biased. But I’d be writing about her either way.

Ebonie was selected for the 2026 Cancer Nation Leadership Academy cohort, and the way she announced it tells you everything you need to know about how she works. She didn’t just share the news. She used the moment to lay out her purpose: she focuses on sexual health and wellness in cancer care — an area the field consistently underaddresses, underresources, and frankly, often refuses to talk about at all.

Here’s the thing Ebonie understands that too many care teams don’t: intimacy, identity, and self-image don’t go on pause when treatment begins. Patients are still whole people. Partners and caregivers are navigating enormous changes with almost no language and almost no support. And survivors come out the other side of treatment sometimes feeling like strangers in their own bodies, with nobody to help them find their way back.

Ebonie is building the infrastructure for those conversations. That’s essential work, and I’m genuinely proud to be in community with her.

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Those are your three for Vol. 8. If someone in your world is doing work like this — advocating, writing, speaking, building, showing up — nominate them. Hit reply or find the nomination link at advocacyatwork.com. And if someone forwarded this to you, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s.