Reflecting on 2024 | MJ DeCoteau

How is another year ending already? Don’t get me wrong, after another whirlwind year with highs and lows, deep loss and lots of connecting and collaborating in our community to keep us going, I’m ready for a little downtime and holiday cheer. Last week, we kicked off end-of-year festivities at Rethink, gathering to celebrate with members of our wonderful community in Toronto. I also had the pleasure of a fun holiday lunch (taco feast) with our little team and then closed the week with a virtual gathering with most of our 24 Key Collaborators from across the country. All in one week!

And at the same time, I’ve been busy in December with advocacy meetings and policy work is the one thing you will never hear me complaining about going too fast. Talk about a holiday wish list, there are signs of movement on not one, but two of our advocacy campaigns. Hoping to share more soon. My schedule the past two weeks has also been chock-full with meetings to report back to our funders, sharing the highlights, the learnings, the challenges, the progress and some of the plans and goals we’re excited about working on in 2025. That number 2025 feels like a big “whoa.” I remember a few years ago, numbers like 2025, 2030 sounded so futuristic and far away… Now these are expiry dates on many of our credit cards. Whaaaat?

With a world that moves so fast, pausing and reflecting is more essential than ever.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting lots on digital spaces. Rethink’s focus has always been on improving breast cancer outcomes for historically underserved groups. It all started in 2001 with getting young people on the breast cancer agenda. Being in a different stage of life as the majority of breast cancer patients, their unique needs were falling through the cracks and that’s essentially why Rethink came to be. When identifying and amplifying the needs and care gaps of a more niche group of breast cancer patients, our rallying cry: The numbers are small, but the needs are real! It’s been the same rallying cry for our work on metastatic outcomes and the same for our efforts on improving outcomes for those who are systemically marginalized due to other factors within the social determinants of health. It’s been over 20 years of pushing the status quo to improve breast cancer outcomes for those historically underserved.

One of the biggest challenges we heard identified by the community when we launched over two decades ago was social isolation. Feeling isolated from same-age peers who don’t have cancer and feeling isolated from the broader breast cancer community, who were mostly 60 years and up. A double whammy. Because breast cancer is rare under 40, building community to address isolation for people diagnosed at a young age, and even delivering support programming, was no easy feat in those early days. While we could bring together enough people to populate in-person support programs in a few larger cities, it was very hard to build community coast to coast given the small number of people with breast cancer under 40 spread out across such a huge country.

Fast forward and I can say that embracing the digital world a decade ago has been an absolute game changer for us. Digital community has been so important and positive for addressing isolation and providing accessible support, and social media has been a huge part of our advocacy success and making positive change. And yet, for all this good, digital, and especially social media, can come with some bad and some downright ugly too. In our attention-economy, social media is very busy and crowded and for education and advocacy content to break through the volume of messages and noise, it’s usually sensationalized headlines and quick and quippy sound bites that do the trick. Increasingly, social media spaces are where predatory, fear-based messaging abounds and is prioritized by algorithms. So, this is something we are navigating and will continue to navigate for the foreseeable future. We’ll continue to be very intentional with our approach to what we add to digital spaces. Nuanced conversations are increasingly challenging on-line, so thank you to each of you who do read our long Instagram captions and comment and reshare our posts in a way that helps create conversation. We are so grateful. We are committed to telling a complete story of breast cancer. And most of the time, that means a complex story. Breast cancer is complex, treatment is complex, our health system is complex, and humans are complex creatures. We truly are.

The overwhelm of on-line social spaces is one of the main reasons we evolved our website this year into more of a support tool, a soft landing for those newly diagnosed. We used to try to tell you about everything we do, say and create on our home page. Now we meet you where you’re at and provide a “choose your adventure” approach. And as we continue to ensure we are offering safe, accessible digital spaces for our community to get support and meet peers, and smart, bold campaigns to advocate for change, we’ll continue to sustainably expand as much in-person programming as we can because we know it feels more important than ever. Who knows, a Rethink in-person gathering may pop up near you or an opportunity to travel to one of our in-person activities may be on the horizon in your future.

Lots of work to do in the new year. But first, we pause and rest.

Wishing you and yours a peaceful holiday season.

— MJ DeCoteau, Rethink’s Founder + Executive Director