In May, Ginny McLean, Nikki Lyons and Al Gustafson represented Swifty at the annual conference of the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) in Philadelphia. Swifty is part of a fourteen foundation advisory council serving as a resource for the CBTTC.
Unique in the world of philanthropy, the foundations function as a collaborative to advise, advocate and provide financial resources for the benefit of the CBTTC.
Al serves as the liaison between the CBTTC Executive Committee and the Advisory Council.
On the first day of the conference Al led the members of the advisory council through an afternoon of Appreciative Inquiry to collectively determine the Council’s objectives for FY2019.
The foundations have joined forces and established a CBTTC Research Fund to incentivize researchers to participate and share their research data with the Consortium. The first grant from the fund was made to a researcher at Lurie Children’s Chicago. The grant supports a project focused on further understanding the epigenetic code of pediatric brain tumors.
The Research Fund will support six to eight projects per year.
